Benjawi.

Having created a basic CMS before, I set about expanding on this so that I could integrate into the Price Tapestry framework. Being a work in progress, it's taking a bit of time as work on the actual site is taking preference. The Price Tapestry framework does so much, and being the main selling point of the site, making that as good as I can is number one priority. This is of course closely followed by the creation of the CMS so that Rob can add and change content as needed.

The CMS for this site is important for many reasons apart from just for adding content. With this site being designed through Mountain Goat Media, many of the seasons fall under search engine optimisation, and so information needs to be easy to update, optimise and maintain.

Why no other CMS will do

I spent a day or two looking at integrating the Price Tapestry framework with another CMS to see how it could work. After finding out that is just doesn't, I found a workaround. This though brings up problems of its own, and an important one that just couldn't be ignored; clean URLs. The way that you integrate Price Tapestry with another CMS is to have the CMS in the root and Price Tapestry in a folder, it's like having two separate sites. Not a problem in its self as you can style them to look the same, but when linking the two the URLs go from looking nice to all over the place.

So what you'll have is www.examplesite.co.uk with the CMS and www.examplesite.co.uk/shopping/ to house Price Tapestry.

While having two separate sites as one site they need to be linked. Price Tapestry does this through the use of external scripts that are run from the main site linking the the Price Tapestry one. Searching, featured products for the home page, etc. It's a fair bit of work, but it can look very nice. Clean URLs are important for SEO purposes, one of the main concerns for Mountain Goat Media when creating websites.

While browsing through www.examplesite.co.uk/shopping/ all the URLs look clean and nice as they should be through the use of mod rewrites. Using the external scripts through the main site though leaves you with ugly URLs which according to the owner of Price Tapestry, there are no work arounds. Put simply, it wasn't really designed for integration, the external scripts were an afterthought when creating the framework.

It's a real shame really, but what can you do? Well, the only thing I've been able to come up with is to create my own CMS and integrate the CMS into Price Tapestry instead of doing it the other way around.

How does my CMS work?

Although I can't call in Price Tapestry script through the database like I'd want, I have been able to call in information from a database to the Price Tapestry framework. A little bit of modifying to the Admin section and pages can be added at will as well as updated. The main thing that I need to work on at the moment is loading the pages. Creating a blog is simple, using said blog to load up all entries or a few and linking to a post is also simple. I applied the same principles to creating the pages although this hasn't yet worked out as I need to so I'm currently working on a solution so that all new pages are completely stored in the database and loaded when called.

My main issue has really been the integration as I need to show certain Price Tapestry items on certain pages. The home page for example uses featured products. While I could get all the main pages to show and load how I want just as standard pages, integrating Price Tapestry has stopped me doing what I need to, as what I need includes both. I need the pages to be easy to add and update and I also need certain Price Tapestry features to show depending on what the page is.

The first thing I tried was trying to call the featured products through the database containing the CMS which failed miserably and I quickly learnt that you can't call parts through a database which is why it can't be integrated into a normal CMS. My next plan included IF statements. I tried wrapping the featured products code in an IF statement so that if the page id equalled 1 (the home page), then to show the featured products, else don't bother. Simple enough right? At first glance, yes, yes it was. But then you click on the About page which has a page id of 2 and featured products was still showing. So back to the drawing board.

So, once the site is finished from a users perspective, I will need to work on finishing the CMS so that it is integrated with Price Tapestry in a manner that works and is easy, instead of integrating Price Tapestry with a CMS and failing with simple SEO problem. No one wants question marks in their URLs, you need them to be meaningful. And that's where I'm at right now, making sure the site works from an SEO perspective while also looking great to potential customers.