Question on Capabilities
I'm looking to make a small site that is similar to sites such as TheTVDB and TVRage except I'm planning to only cover one primary genre of shows, Tokusatsu shows from Japan (Super Sentai, Metal Heroes, Ultraman, Kamen Rider, etc). I dislike how other sites handle the shows and using them makes it difficult for for various apps that scrape them to get accurate information.
I am looking for opinions of if Fork could allow me to do this easily. While I have programming experience it is not at all web oriented.
Here is how TheTVDB currently looks for one of these shows.
I'm basically planning just a hierarchy from Series -> Show Title -> Episode List -> Episode Info (Title, Number, Writer, Director, Actors, Description, Absolute Positioning, etc). I then need an API setup to send this information, whether it is for the Show Name, Theme, etc or the episode info so it can be scraped by things like Kodi or PLEX.
From my couple of hours of research, it seems I may be able to accomplish this via Fork and I'm just wondering if I'm not barking up the wrong tree.
Thank you for your time, Andrew
Hi Andrew, I think TheTVDB and TVRage are custom built webapplications, but if you're looking to create something smaller, Fork CMS would be capable of that. Basically you would need to create one or more modules that help you manage series with episodes in the backend.
In the backend, you could create an index page of your Tokusatsu module to show the series in a datagrid list with some filters on top. Then, when you click on a serie, you get a detail page where you have two tabs: one where you can enter basic info of the show and one tab where you see a datagrid of the episodes in the show. Then you can click on an episode and edit that information, ... Ofcourse having buttons to create new serie or new episode, etc. The best way to get started with module development is to check some other Fork CMS modules and check how they're built. Most modules do pretty much the same: have a frontend action (index, detail), fetch data from the database in the model class, and pass it back to the action which parses it into the template.
It's possible to provide some api calls I believe, although I haven't done that for a module yet. Checkout src/Backend/Modules/Blog/Engine/Api.php
In the frontend you can parse the information in templates, have pagination, ... We're close to releasing Fork CMS v4 with a new backend layout, and Twig templating support in backend and frontend, so that would definitely be useful too.
If you have questions how to get started, feel free to ask them on our Slack: Fork CMS Slack channel. It's the fastest way to get an answer most of the times :)
Heh, I'm in the slack channel, it just appears to be very quiet. Thank you, I will look into this further then. Only took 3-4 hours for me to install it on a test server (figuring out how to get the dependencies updated took a little bit).
Yeah because of the weekend/national holiday, and because the Slack channel is fairly new... :)
But if you are stuck and pose a question, there's always someone that can help you right away. Also because the core developers are on Slack (and they don't check the forum that much) ;)