Resultant Systems

I recently added several new Splash Tags for the Splash content management system. If you don’t know about Splash, read my Introduction to Splash article.

• <s: find>
• <s: children-each>
• <s: children-first >
• <s: children-last >
• <s: ifFirst >
• <s: unlessFirst >
• <s: ifLast >
• <s: unlessLast >

There’s a complete list of tags and documentation over on the GitHub Wiki. But, I’ll give you an overview and show you how to use these tags for a blog.

<s:find> This tag looks up a page and stores the page object so that subsequent tags can use that page object.

<s: children-each> The tag finds all the children of a page and loops over them.

<s: children-first > and <s: children-last > finds the first or last child page.

The rest of the tags are all used inside of a <s: children-each> tag. They check to see if the current child page is the first one, last one, or whatever.

Making a Blog page with Splash Tags

Let’s say you have a page named Blog, that has several posts that are child pages of Blog. Then, in the body for the blog page, put something like this:

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<h3>Articles</h3>

<s:find slug="blog">

  <s:children-each

   order="publishedAt desc"

   where="status='published'">

    <cfset thisChild = request.tags.currentChild>

    <cfoutput>

      <dt class="blogList">

         <a href="#thisChild.slug#">#thisChild.title#</a>

            | #DateFormat(thisChild.publishedAt, 'long')#</dt>

      <dd class="blogDesc">#thisChild.description#</dd>

    </cfoutput>

  </s:children-each>

</s:find>

<s:find slug=”blog”> finds the blog page, and then <s:children-each> loops over all the pages. By the way, <s:children-each> uses the CFWheels findAll model method, so all of the cool CFWheels parameters are available in <s:children-each>!

If you want to see an example of what this looks like, visit the DonorUp blog page.

All in all, that’s a lot of output for very little programming effort. That’s what I call the secret to programmer happiness!

Clarke Bishop CFWheels, ColdFusion, Splash CMS CFWheels, ColdFusion, Splash CMS