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As mentioned in the Introduction to Pages guide, unlike our other applications Pages is a blank slate. Its purpose is to give you tools to build your own areas of your community. As a result, it can seem a little intimidating to new users, and especially non-coders, because it's up to you to build what you need with the tools provided. This tutorial aims to help you get started by walking through the creation of a simple recipe section. The concepts we cover here can be applied to all kinds of s
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The first thing we're going to do is create a page, into which we'll insert our database later.
A page is the foundation of almost everything in Pages; it gives your content a place to be accessed by users. Sometimes, a page may just have static text using a WYSIWYG block. Other times (like in our case), they may be a container for a database.
To manage your pages, navigate to Pages -> Pages in the AdminCP. You'll see a listing of your current pages and folders. Click Add Pag
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What is a database?
The Databases feature in Pages gives you the tools you need to create your own custom data-driven sections of your community. You define the settings and fields in the database, and Pages gives you support for categories, comments, reviews, ratings and more - just like full IPS Community Suite applications.
Creating the database
Databases are set up in the AdminCP, by navigating to Pages -> Databases. You'll see a listing of the current data
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How to add
We now have our page ready, and the database created (albeit completely default and without any customization yet!). The next thing we'll do is add the database to the page. Since we created page as a Page Builder page, we can do this just by dragging and dropping.
To open the page builder, first go to the page listing in the AdminCP, at Pages -> Pages. Click the magic wand icon to the right of your recipes page:
Pages Listing
This will ta
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The next thing we're going to focus on is creating our categories. If you've created categories in the other IPS4 applications, it's a very similar process.
How to set up categories
When you hover on the Pages tab in the AdminCP, you'll see your database is now listed as a menu item, and a link for Categories is available underneath. Click this link to view the current categories. You'll see a default "Records" category.
Click Create New to add a new one. We'll na
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Custom fields are what you use to make a database that is specific to your needs. IPS4 supports a wide range of field types so that you can collect data in the appropriate formats, from text and numbers, to upload fields and YouTube embeds.
We're going to create a few different fields to gather information about each recipe that we can then display in our database. They are:
List of ingredients
Prep time
Cook time
Cuisine
A link to a YouTube video recipe
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We now have a complete, working database for our recipe section! Feel free to take it further - experiment with the other options we haven't used, or if you have any familiarity with HTML coding, try creating your own templates.
There's a couple of other handy features in Pages that it's worth pointing out.
Database Filters
When we created the Cuisine field, we enabled the Allow Filtering option. In Pages, database filters are available as a sidebar block that you c