Month: August 2009

Integrating a Blog with an Existing CMS

I recently finished a project for a client whose site was built on the DotNetNuke CMS. He wanted to integrate a blog into his site, so I was faced with three choices:

  1. Find a suitable blog module for DotNetNuke
  2. Write a DNN blog module from scratch
  3. Find another blog platform and use it alongside the CMS

After failing to locate a blog module that I thought would satisfy the client, and not having the budget to write one from scratch, I was left with one choice. However, the next challenge presented itself. Since the visitor already has a login to the CMS site, it would be nice if they didn’t also have to login to the blog. This was going to require some custom coding, so the chosen blog platform had to expose a robust API. WordPress looked like it had all the answers. Now that I had the two platforms, the challenge was to get them to talk to each other.

The WordPress API includes functions for creating new users and logging them in. So the plan was to develop a WordPress plugin that would automatically check who the current CMS user was, register them with the blog if necessary, then log them in. WordPress would know who was logged in by checking a cookie stored by the CMS.

The following diagram illustrates the main components of the solution:

Blog and CMS
Blog and CMS

I would like to point out a couple items of interest with this solution:

  1. Cookies are only able to be read by code within the same domain. Therefore, you would not be able to use this method if your CMS was at www.yourdomain.com and the blog was hosted at, say, WordPress.com.
  2. Once the user clicks the blog link at the CMS, the cookie is stored for the blog’s use. If the user was visiting the site on a shared computer, you would not want another user to visit the blog and be automatically logged in as the previous user. Therefore, the cookie expires at the end of each user’s session.

If anyone else has had to tackle something similar to this, or have other ideas on how this could have been accomplished, I would love to hear from you.

Magento Architecture for a Simple Module

Preparing to write my first custom Magento module, I dove into the documentation that was available, as well as various blog posts, and slowly started to understand some of the pieces. The whole picture was eluding me, however, so I began to diagram how everything fit together. I referred to the following pages when creating the diagrams:

http://activecodeline.com/writing-a-custom-module-in-magento-detailed-walktrough/

http://www.exploremagento.com/magento/simple-custom-module.php

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/576908/how-does-magento-code-work

Please note two cautionary items before reading further. 1) I am new to the Magento framework, so the following explanations are based on my limited knowledge of this subject. 2) These diagrams detail an extremely simple custom module that does not take advantage of many advanced features, including layouts and controllers. I am hoping though that they may shed some light for some of you. I am currently working through some of those advanced features, however, and hope to post an article when I am comfortable with them as well.

I will dissect the module here, but you may view the whole thing at once at the bottom of this post.

For the new module to be registered and seen by Magento, an XML file needs to be created in the following path: [store]/app/etc/modules/, where [store] is your store’s root directory. The XML file needs to be named with the following convention: [namespace_module].xml, where namespace is your code’s namespace (defined by you, usually your company name) and module is your module’s name.

Magento Module Registration
Magento module registration

Your actual module resides in the following path: [store]/app/code/local/[namespace]/[module] and its several subfolders. You will create a configuration file in the etc folder called config.xml.

Configure the Magento Module
Configure the Magento module

Now the module needs to do something when it is called by a template, so we will create a code file called View.php and place it in the module’s Block folder.

Configuring the View
Configuring the view

We will now move over to the theme, or skin, to see how to make use of this module on an actual store page. Your theme contains a template folder which holds folders for your modules. We will create a View.phtml file that outputs direct HTML and calls a function for more HTML in its model, or block, at View.php.

Output of the view
Output of the view

The only thing left is to actually instantiate the module on a store page. This will most likely be done as an integrated part of your theme, but for now we will keep it simple. Enter the CMS portion of your store and open up a page of your choice. Enter the following line somewhere in the body:

{{block type=”Namespace_Module/View” template=”module/View.phtml”}}

substituting namespace and module for your actual names.

What has happened here is that you’ve instantiated your module’s view (View.php) using the template (View.phtml). View.phtml now outputs HTML and calls its underlying model to provide more functionality.

I hope this makes sense for you and comes in as a handy supplement to the aforementioned links, as I am only beginning to grasp it. Feel free to comment and set me straight if I’m off in left field on any of this.

Here are the diagrams in full:

Magento module architecture
module architecture
Magento module skin architecture
Skin architecture