Getting Started

After successfully installing TFCMS, it is now time to make some modifications to the index.php file. Unless you want to dive into the source code and figure everything out yourself (though i have left some useful comments in index.php for anyone to follow), then we'll have to go over much of the inner workings of the system in order to have a working set-up that fits your needs.

Constants

In PHP, a constant is like an immutable keyword, so it can only be defined once in the script. TFCMS uses two constants to make things easier when working with paths: __cwd and __root. __cwd is the current working directory, which is the directory which index.php is located in. In case you're wondering, when i say "directory" i mean the location you would see if you were in a file manager and not a web browser. That is, __cwd on a Unix-like machine may point to /home/user/public_html/tfcms, and __root may point to /home/user/public_html.

File Structure

For simplicity's sake and to keep everything tidy, though not entirely standard locations, most locations are made standard. You should consider everything to be pretty much relative to the index.php file unless perhaps you mess around with the __cwd or __root constants.

Assume the current working directory is the __root directory. The default file structure would look like this:

• /modules
• /templates
• /Default
• /style.css
• /index.tpl
• /base.css
• /home.html
• /index.php

The items in bold are standard files and locations, statically referenced within the system (with the exception of index.php). The ones italicized are pseudo standard, meaning they have been named by the user and are not statically referenced within the core of the content management system. index.php, however, is only considered a standard if your web server or web host's configuration gives priority to PHP files with the name index. In order to satisfactorily provide proper paths to each, the __cwd constant was used to determine the location for each, both from a file manager's prospective and a web browser's prospective.

API

Documentation is provided with each release of TFCMS. The documentation lists all that TFCMS provides. In order to understand most of what is written in the documentation, you'll have to do some research on functions and object-oriented programming. The index.php file that comes with TFCMS illustrates how some of it works.

Maintenance

Due to the initial design of the system, no control panel was made (and there are no future plans to make one, though it is possible to make one for this system). Meaning that creating, deleting, moving, renaming and editing files are left to the user. This content management system was made to only display what you tell it to.