Column System

There are two separate Plugins bundled with the stock I-Metrics CMS. The left and right column systems. As the functionality of the 2 plugins is very similar, we will describe their functionality in this common article.

The column system plugin operates on both the administrator and web-front. On the administrator it deploys a single database table to store text pages and collections where the plugin will be activated. When the administrator assigns a text page or a collection to the column system he has control of 2 additional fields. A box title and the box description. The objective is once a specific text page or collection is loaded, the column plugin is activated and displays an additional box with the custom title and description.

Multiple boxes may appear on the same page driven by the column system as the administrator has the ability to assign multiple titles and descriptions to the same text page or collection. In addition each box entry (title/description) can be enabled or disabled as well has it's display order set. The display order instructs the column system in which order to display the box entries.

On the web-front the column system plugin hooks on the html_right and/or html_left calls. When called the column system invokes the associated templates after retrieving the box content data from the database. The result is the active column contains additional boxes with the HTML content specified by the administrator.

When there is no associated entry the column system falls back to its default behavior which is to dynamically associate the text page or collection with parent elements, in which case will display a summary and links of the parent collection.