Guest
15 Aug 2012 06:31

I realise that Cobalt 7 is new, and that writing documentation is a lot less fun than writing software, but it would be a real help to have some basic information that shows the sort of things Cobalt is capable of doing, and where to start. I have, more by luck than anything, got the Blog demonstration working - although I am not quite sure what I did to fix the parameter problem (I just hit everything I could find and eventually it started working!).

For example, my immediate need is a simple database record creation and retrieval system. I am building a site for a music society and I need to show details of our concerts: - Date of concert, Composer, Musical Work. I need facilities for a site administrator to add, delete, and amend the records, and then I need to display them in a formatted and sortable manner on a Public page.

I am sure this is something that Cobalt can do without difficulty, but I am still trying to fathom how to go about it. I created an input form with the necessary fields, but when I use it, it appears more like a blog entry with Title, rating, Avatar, etc. Then I have no idea how to retrieve the records I created and put them in a formatted table.

Could someone tell me first of all if what I want to do is possible with Cobalt 7. If so, some general guidance on how to tackle it would be good. One upon a time I would have done this in raw php and mySQL, but Cobalt seems a more easily maintainable environment once I can get my hear around it!

No fun developing a system if no one can use it, so can you advise?

Last Modified: 02 Mar 2014


Sergey
Total posts: 13,748
15 Aug 2012 07:38

Could someone tell me first of all if what I want to do is possible with Cobalt 7

Absolutely.

Even more you can use relation(parent, child) fields to connect articles with on-to-many or many-to-many relationship. It means that every concert will list, list of composers, music works int he post. But every composer or music work will be another Cobalt article in section Composers, Music Works. It means that when you go to section composers and see composer you will see list а concerts of this composer and so on..

Could someone tell me first of all if what I want to do is possible with Cobalt 7

I created an input form with the necessary fields, but when I use it, it appears more like a blog entry with Title, rating, Avatar, etc.

I would say everything about Cobalt is a templates. Templates give you everything. Because it is always more or less easy to create form, but it is hard to let it display as you want. This is strong part of Cobalt. You can manage templates for every section and type and create formatting you want. I would suggest you to read this article.

Once you understand how things are working you will have no limit of what you can do.

One of the tip also would be that parameters in Cobalt divided to 2 types.

  1. Logical. Those parameter you can see in section, category, type and field. Those parameter sets how Cobalt behave.

  2. Formatting. Those parameter you can see in templates parameters. And those parameters set how things looks.

So if you want to turn off avatar oк creation date it is formatting. Then you go to template parameters.

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