Little Book of CMS

Elements
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Just to keep everyone up to date, The Little Book of Elements CMS is currently sitting at 90 pages (!). I’ve got 7 Punch List things to finish as well as another full editing pass on it. Dan/Ben/Tom have a copy and are looking at it. My hope is that we can get this thing ready for the public in the next week to ten days.

The more I work on this project, the more I’m a fan of the CMS. It really is dirt simple, with a touch of complex. The complexity is really just understanding what does what, where it is, and how you build the linkages initially. The dirt simple is that, once built, running a blog is very, very simple and to the point. Yes, for the time being, you have to enter posts in Elements and publish from there, but Realmac has promised an optional create/post-on-Web tool down the road that should remove that last (perceived) barrier. I’m almost convinced now that my 91-year old mom could run her own blog using Elements if I just design it for her.

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can’t wait ! :smiley:

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You’re going to see me about to call @elementsbot for something. This example is in the book.

How do I show just the first 200 characters of item.body when using twig in the CMS?

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Ah, a classic case of “how do I trim this down?”! In Twig, you can use the slice filter to get just the first 200 characters of item.body. Here’s how you can do it:

{{ item.body|slice(0, 200) }}

This will give you a nice, neat preview of your content. If you want to make it even fancier, you can add an ellipsis:

{{ item.body|slice(0, 200) ~ '...' }}

Now your 91-year-old mom can blog away without overwhelming her readers! :wink:

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@thominator I’ve had a quick scan through and the content looks really great!

I’d still love for it to be part of the CMS docs :wink: Seems silly for us to re-invent (or rewrite) the wheel!

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