Can I use Armadillo & Sitelok on same site? Pros & Cons?

There’s a lot in your post and I won’t address all the issues. But I’m sorry for bad experiences in the past.

When you use Sitelok and Disqus SSO plugin together there’s nothing for your members to do. They don’t need to create a Disqus account: Sitelok has done that already. And their comments are private to your community. Disqus does provide some options: ordering comments from oldest to newest, or visa versa, for example. But these are basic. Perhaps the only thing you’d want to inform members about is they can receive email notifications of additional comments if they want (there’s a little subscribe button that is visible and optional with a Disqus button).

Now let’s go beyond the blog a bit. This part may be irrelevant to you, but at least it’s worth knowing about. With Armadillo you can create solo content areas. The big thing is these are not blog posts. This content could be on any page, or make up a complete page. You can also add a Disqus commenting to that page and due to the Sitelok + Disqus SSO plugin members can automatically comment on that page if you want. (This is great for group activities, or basic planning where you want feedback, or for many other uses.)

As long as your focus is on “members” and not the general public, then you’ve made a case for Sitelok. It’s as simple as that. This means, presumably, your blog would also be for members only.

… but since all of this is new for you I would suggest building up bit by bit instead of everything at once. For example, create the Armadillo blog but with Disqus commenting turned off. Once you have that down well then add Sitelok. Then add your members. Once you have that down well then add the Disqus SSO plugin that works with Sitelok (I think this costs an additional $15). Once you have that done you can activate Disqus commenting on your blog page and anywhere else you want.

… or if you’re really worried about others looking at your work before done then do the opposite. Install Sitelok first, Apply to all pages (or all “relevant” pages). Make sure the only member who can see the page is you. Simple eh? Now when you publish there’s only one person who can see the content on the web. Later add Armadillo and other stuff.

Thanks again for you in-depth answers. I need to muck it up a few times & start over a few times to work it out I think. Haven’t got any substantial progress to report.

Just as more background: I’ve seen the disqus plug-in & read a fair bit about the 2 apps, which is part of what put me onto them. There are gaps, even as NimbleHost has some good videos.

I have short term goals & long term ones, albeit sloppily defined.
This is possible as I’m not trying to build sites for other people!

The site, as it I quickly slapped it together previously - already allowed the download of my images & I shouldn’t be too concerned there.

I believe my webhost only allows one site. Its geared toward someone with a decent grasp of what they are doing without a lot of help, I think. At least if one is trying to do something special & I’m trying not to expect a full course out of them.

Thus I’m trying to get my test drives done in one shot while figuring it out.
I’m just going to have to screw it up as part of the learning curve.

Yep, playing around with it is the only way to learn well.

However, it would be highly unusual that a web host would only allow one site. Typically what they do is limit how much space you can use. What is more likely is that they are limiting you to one domain. For instance here are two domains:

www.mycoolsite.com
www.bearsforsummer.com

On the other hand here could be two sites on the same domain:

www.mycoolsite.com
www.mycoolsite.com/reflections

Notice that you could put a whole “sub site” in the reflections area. I do this all the time with some course sites I develop. Sitelok is good for one domain only (or buy extra copies for extra domains) but I can use one copy of Sitelok for both websites above as they are on the same domain. I admit this way of doing websites is typically not a good way to go for business enterprises. But for me, who doles out the course website link to students, it works fine.

Much more importantly for you this approach would work nicely for a test website. So your two sites could be:

mycoolwebsite.com (the real one you want people to visit)
mycoolwebsite.com/testing (the one you use for testing only)

2 Likes

I agree with @Mathew’s suggestion regarding a test site. To add to it, in order to keep those pages from being indexed by search engines, uncheck Index and Follow in the page inspector for those page (only!). These SHOULD BE CHECKED for any/all pages you want Google, et. al., to find.

Matt,
Not sure if my long rambling posts are any benefit to others downstream, other people with similar questions
but… here goes…

btw: Reflections yielded a "404 not found” error.

  1. One problem I’ve experienced may be trying to over-organize re: Armadillo.
    The “Crufted” thing. I changed “index” to “Armadillo_Index” & was experimenting anew, which created awkward Armadillo folders on several levels in the folder structure. Got that sorted out & got rid of conflicts so I have a new Armadillo blog (empty) out there.

Only thing: Blog created in the project: But seems to be driven purely from what I created online & they don’t both contain blog content, only a framework framework locally in RW project.

  1. Little Oak is my current webhost.

  2. I believe I may have misspoken attributing help to NimbleHost.
    Glancing back to email exchanges, it might have been at Little Oak, or perhaps Adrian at Sitelok (uncertain w/o research).

  3. I’m wondering why Armadillo is considered a CMS & beginning to wonder how to use it to best effect.
    Trying to find a justification for using it beyond blogs; Since it gets added as potentially a menu item & I don’t know what I’m gaining in other uses & thus don’t know what else belongs under Armadillo.

  4. As for blogs. I like the way you can pick blogs from a drop down list. Armadillo has much the same tier of users as Sitelok.

Limiting entrance to certain blogs vs others for members of dissimilar interest may not be possible in my final site. (One thing I was considering, but they are perhaps too mutually-exclusive site projects/subjects to blend).

  1. Very good point about test-creating multiple sites. I know I can create multiple subsites, such as special ancillary “regions" (if I can appropriate terminology pell-mell). Test-creating whole new sites left me thinking abt registering new domains & probably muddled myself in so doing. For the sake of testing, subdomain ought be fine.

  2. I need to recreate the Sitelok db & figure out out to coalsesce the two & where they overlap, as well. (I could gripe about how some of RW add-on tools are described before one buys. There are demos. However, the copy on so many of these plugins, etc are slick descriptions that don’t always explain well what you’re getting in fuctionality to a novice user, or if it fits your case. Not wishing to disparage Armadillo & Sitelok in this tangent).

Then, I am led to wonder which way to best create the blog - as part of the parent page, or a blog SUBsite on the web host.

Thanks also to Dave.

Unfortunately I don’t have the time to answer all your questions, but …

  1. I would definitely keep separate mySQL databases for Sitelok and Armadillo. Not sure why you are trying to combine these. It might work, but it could also end in disaster. Just create 2 databases, one for each.
  2. There is not need to add any Armadillo “stuff” to your main navigation menu. Likely unneeded.
  3. I don’t know what you are trying to accomplish at your site. So an Armadillo blog may be all you need (or a couple of blogs) but Armadillo also offers a “solo content” option. So you could have entire non-blog pages, or portions of non-blog pages, which are editable via the Armadillo web-based editor. This may be a great feature, or completely unneeded by you.

Best,

Mathew

Thanks for the time taken.
I think my impressions of a CMS function was perhaps too draconian.

Question: Is/are Stacks the only place you can double size of an image for Retina Displays?
It doesn’t work in Armadillo blog posts, much to my chagrin. Is any of this theme dependent?

It means still another size image for potentially the same image; one for the photo pages & stacks
pages wherein it works - and the dinky size for inline placement in Armadillo blogs. Not insurmountable, but messy.

peterdanckwerts, Are you having success with your blend of SiteLok & Armadillo?

Hi everyone, I have a further question about using Armadillo & Sitelok on the same site. Is there a way to have a single (or simple) login for both?

Here’s what I’m trying to do:

My client wants a secure area for a group of people to discuss things and upload and download files.

I’ve used Sitelok to create the secure area, and given permissions to the relevant group members. So they can login to that area.

I tried using Armadillo within the secure area to:

  1. use the blog facility to let people discuss various subjects (which because of it’s blog nature creates ‘minutes’ of the discussion).
  2. use a solo content area to enable the uploading/downloading of files (they are usually small files such as Word documents or small .pdfs).

This method worked when I tested it, except for the ‘loop issue’; when I logged into the Armadillo part, the page refreshed, and I had to re-login to the secure area (Armadillo was open to use).

My client, and the group members would find this login behaviour confusing, and so would probably ask me for another method if I let this go ‘live’.

At the moment I have removed Armadillo, and used a filemanager stack (Will Woodgate), inside Embed (also Will Woodgate) using the iFrame option. This results in a file manager window showing a folder on my server.

Has anyone any ideas how to employ Armadillo within Sitelok?

Thank you.

You’re trying to do several things, and it’s early in the morning where I live, so I may be misunderstanding part of what you are trying to do. Having said that …

  1. S4S Fileman stack is very nice and probably quite useful for you. What I do is create a password for Fileman that I give to all my students. So they can then directly go to the page and enter. This Fileman area will be independent of Armadillo, though the notice about the page (incl password) and link to it could be behind a Sitelok protected page.
  2. I’m not sure from your message that you are using Fileman. Here’s the direct link: https://stacks4stacks.com/fileman/
  3. I use Disqus with Armadillo. Disqus provides the commenting capability. Unfortunately I think Disqus no longer offers single sign on that works with Sitelok (unless you buy Disqus’ pro package). You might want to explore using a commenting stack within RW. There’s the Backsnap product by YabDab.

I hope this helps a bit.

Thank you Mathew,

yes, my current solution is to use the Fileman stack protected on a Sitelok page. I hadn’t thought of using a commenting stack to enable a discussion; I’ll look at that, thank you.

Hi Matthew, I came across this post from Jan '17. Hope you don’t mind a follow up from so much later! I need to add Disqus commenting to Armadillo Solo Content. Obviously it’s not built in to Armadillo, but I wondered if there was any guidance available. I’m trying to follow the Disqus “Universal Code install instructions.” I’m slightly stumped by the need to generate a unique “this.page.identifier” for the solo content.

I was assuming that I would need to embed the Disqus code at then end of each solo content. Am I on the right track?

Cheers

David

David: Unfortunately I’m not currently using Armadillo. And the last time I used it (1+ years ago) it was with a different server than I’m using now. This all means I have no way to go back and check settings. I know I did use Disqus with Armadillo. And it worked fine. I would try to contact the developer (Jonathan) directly.