Display your traffic with the visitors module

The visitors module is a new Fork module created at Wijs to show recent visitors an a map. It uses Google Analytics integration and Google maps to fetch data and nicely display it. Next to these visitors, items from other modules can be shown on this map. The code is crafted for easy integration with other modules. You can add a location to these linked items and show them on the map with a link to their detail page.

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Slideshows module

To say this is a new module would be a bit of a lie. It has been tried and tested in Real Projects™ at Wijs, but privately engineered by Dave Lens, who recently decided to open-source this module. Hear hear!

It contains the following features:

  • Generates widgets that can be linked to any page block in Fork.
  • Can load images from another module into a slideshow.
    (see Settings → Modules → Slideshows to configure this). 
  • Possibility to add multiple slideshow types.
  • Uses (a slightly customized) responsive Flexslider jQuery plugin to control 
  • Changing measurements for a slideshows resizes all previously uploaded images to the new format.

The goal of this module was to be developer friendly, and to spend as little time as possible loading images from a separate module. Once configured, it will generate a slideshows.php file containing an empty getImages() method for the specified module in its engine folder. Typically a developer will do either a database query, or read out a folder in that method in order to build image data. The slideshows widget will then use that method to populate itself with the provided image data.

Extra tip: Keep an eye on the GitHub repository, in the near future an example of how to link the slideshows module with other modules will be added!

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Say hello to our new documentation

Since the moment Fork CMS went open-source people were asking about more documentation. We made guides to build extensions and posted extra information on our blog. Still we felt we couldn't keep up the demand on information that our community was asking for.

Our new system is based on GitHub, which is made for collaboration. It gives our community the opportunity to spread their knowledge using the system they already know. The articles are written using Markdown which allows writers to focus on their content instead of worrying about html. All the markdown data that is stored on GitHub gets cached onto our website and is converted to html through the GitHub Markdown renderer. The result is having the benefits from both displaying documentation right through our website and having powerful GitHub collaboration features.

The first two guides Installation and Getting Started are made to welcome newcomers to setup their very first Fork CMS website. They show best practices and help overcome the most common problems. In the User Guide some of the basic principles about using our system gets explained. Another worth mentioning new guide is about contributing. In these articles gets explained how decisions within Fork as an organisation are made and how you can improve the CMS in all different areas.

This is the start of what we think good documentation should look like. We want to keep improving the available information and we look forward to see our community's contributions.

Take a look and share your feedback!

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Module maker

  • Written by Wouter Sioen on Monday 8 July 2013
  • 3 comments

The module generates a fully installable module with a good working backend and a basic frontend. It uses a wizard to let you choose

  • which fields you want to use in your items
  • which field to hook the meta on
  • if you want to use drag and drop sequencing
  • if you want to make some fields searchable
  • if you want to use categories
  • if you want to add tags
  • if you want a multifileuploader to add multiple images to each item

In the frontend, the generated code contains some best practices like meta tags, open graph tags and Twitter card.

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New Theme: Opengray

  • Written by Dieter Wyns on Wednesday 19 June 2013
  • 2 comments

We would describe the theme as clean and corporate, but take a look for yourself at our demo website.

The Fork CMS theme OpenGray

Features

The theme includes customized content templates which allow you to quickly make call-to-actions in the layout of the theme. Although the live search functionality is standard in Fork CMS it's nice to see a clean implementation in this theme. The user is redirected to this page if he couldn't find what he was looking for via the autosuggest.

Building a community or want a login for your clients? If you add the login box widget to the main navigation it provides a dropdown menu to quickly access the profile actions.

Other features:

  • microdata
  • meta navigation support
  • multilingual support
  • etc.

Download the theme on the extension page. Missing something or want to make your own version? Fork the theme on GitHub.

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The numbers

We come a long way since the first version of Fork CMS was made open for the public. In october we celebrate our third open-source anniversary. And the very first documents for the closed version found in the archive are made in march 2007. With the switch to Symfony it is a good time take a look back and see how we're doing.

Since the launch of the website on september 1st 2011 we had more than 60.000 downloads. That's about 100 downloads each day. If we take the numbers over time, we see a large interest at the launch of the new website because of the mention on Mashable.

Timeline of downloads in Google Analytics

GitHub is where all the magic happens these days, all code contributions go through the platform, which gives us interesting data to look at. We register 35 contributors who helped us to build our codebase. Around 650 people are following us on GitHub and 150 created a subversion (or a fork) of the cms.

Timeline of commits on GitHub

What's next? The core developers team is working hard to get the switch to Symfony to go as fast as possible. Along this way, we hope to welcome the Symfony community. In the next weeks and months we will try to improve growth in contributions and try to let our current users grow with us to Symfony.

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Introducing Fork CMS Partners

A great website is built to meet your marketing goals and helps you strengthen your brand and customer base. Our easy-to-use interface helps you accomplish that. Without any technical knowledge you can update the website's content to fit your needs. 

Setting up a website requires a more technical approach, therefore we encourage you to contact one of our partners to assist you. They have the expertise to guide you through the process of building the most profitable website.

To help you find the right partner we listed them on the support page of our website. We started with 21 partners that can help you setup a good Fork CMS website. The list is ordered randomly and contains the necessary information to find and contact the most suitable partner. We're in the work of extending both the amount of partners as the information provided. All suggestions are welcome!

Companies who'd like to be added as a partners can contact us at any time. 

Visit the partners page.

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Multivariate Testing module

  • Written by Gert-Jan Meire on Tuesday 7 May 2013
  • 3 comments

A little while ago there were a few people requesting the integration of something like an A/B testing tool in Fork, and because Fork is a CMS system that is marketing-oriented it would be a good idea to make this available to it's users as an extension.

Because I'm doing my internship at Wijs as a PHP developer, where they make a lot of use of Fork, I could make this a valuable learning experience. So after some consideration and brainstorming I decided to create a Multivariate Testing module as part of my internship.

It will be available as an installable extension because we wish to keep the core of Fork as small as possible. Besides, installing an extension only takes a few minutes!

Why Multivariate Testing?
The difference between the two is that A/B testing is comparing two entirely different versions of the same page, and Multivariate Testing is comparing parts of a page.

I chose for Multivariate Testing because it's a more logical choice to have as a starting point. It enables us to use the widget system of Fork to let users easily create and maintain their own Multivariate Testing. In literally minutes a user can create a test that consists of either content and/or forms. 

The forms work together with an extension called Form Builder and is delivered as part of the Fork CMS download package. If installed the Multivariate Testing module will automatically adapt itself and give the user the option to add forms as versions of their tests. If the user doesn't have this extension installed he can still create content-only tests.

Benefits
Another benefit of using this module is that it is integrated, like the Google Analytics and Mail motor extensions, in Fork and thus you don't need to install any extra third party tools. And there is also an API (Application Programming Interface) available so third party applications can get the information of your own tests with ease.

We also don't make use of any Javascript manipulation to track the click-through rate for your tests. This is a lot better than manipulating your website with Javascript because no extra files need to be loaded that could slow down your website!

What can it do?
It's primary function is to create Multivariate Tests that are part of your website as a Fork widget. After adding one of your tests to your website, you can see the click-through rate and further information visualised in the back-end under "Statistics".

Multivariate testing
Multivariate testing

Feedback
This module is still in development and we'd appreciate all feedback you can give us. If you find any bugs or have any feedback or great ideas or additions please let us know! You can download this module on the Fork CMS website under extensions or on github if you wish to contribute to the code.

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