Tip: watch in full screen

Content

• short note on installation
• presenting a basic ‘contact-us’ form
• different options for validating the mailer form
• a tip on how to use two mailer forms on the same page

Resources

• Radiant Mailer Extension github repository
• Aissac’s fork of Radiant Mailer Extension
• Radiant Mailer Extension client-side validation using a prototype based JS library
• Jomz’s fork of Radiant Mailer Extension with client-side validation
• Github repository for Radiantcasts episode 4

Tip: watch in full screen

Resources:

• Radiant Globalize2 Extension official page
• Radiant Globalize2 Extension github repository
• Radiant Paperclipped github repository
• Radiant Globalize2 Paperclipped Extension official page
• Radiant Globalize2 Paperclipped Extension github repository
• Github repository for episode 3

In the following screencast you’ll see how to install and use the Globalize2 Extension. This extension allows you to easily translate the content of your site into any number of languages. It uses the Globalize2 Rails plugin based on the I18N API available in Rails since version 2.2

Tip: watch in full screen

Resources:

• Radiant Globalize2 Extension official page
• Radiant Globalize2 Extension github repository
• Github repository for episode 2

In the following screencast you’ll see how to install and use the Sitemap XML extension and why should you use it.

Tip: watch in full screen

Resources:

• Radiant Sitemap XML Extension official page
• Radiant Sitemap XML Extension github repository
• Information on sitemaps
• Github repository for episode 1

It uses the Globalize2 Rails plugin based on the I18N API available in Rails since version 2.2

Features:

• Provides the ability to translate your pages (title, slug, breadcrumb, description, keywords) using the Radiant admin interface.
• Provides the ability to translate your snippets and layouts using the Radiant admin interface.
• Radius tags for accessing the locales and translations.
• Possibility to completely delete the translation for a page.

Check out the source code on github.

For installation and configuration details visit the Radiant Globalize2 Extension documentation page.

To translate your Paperclipped assets, you can use Radiant Globalize2 Paperclipped Extension:

Features:

• Provides the ability to translate Paperclipped assets (title and caption) using the Radiant admin interface.
• Altered Paperclipped Radius Tags which take into account the locale

Check out the source code on github.

For installation and configuration details visit the Radiant Globalize2 Paperclipped Extension documentation page.

Radiant Custom Fields extension (github repository):

An extension that allows you to add custom fields to pages.

Radiant Database Mailer extension (github repository):

An extension that adds database persistence to emailed forms. It works on top of the Radiant Mailer extension and the fields recorded to the database are user defined.

Radiant Member Extension (github repository):

An extension that adds members support to Radiant CMS. Using this extension you can restrict access to pages on your public site to be accessible only to members that have an account. It is based on Restful Authentication System, so the member model has almost the same attributes. The members can be added or edited only from Radiant Admin.

Radiant Paginate extension (github repository):

An extension that provides pagination support using Will Paginate.

Radiant Sitemap XML extension (github repository):

This extension automatically creates a XML sitemap for your site.

Radiant Stereotype extension (github repository):

An extension that adds templating support.

Radiant Super Export extension (github repository):

An extension that provides portability to your project by allowing you to export and import the records in the database and making it easy to manage them with a source control tool like Git or Subversion.

Radiant Tiny Paper extension (github repository):

An extension that adds Paperclipped based Tiny MCE support to Radiant CMS. Provides a Rich Text Editor filter and allows you to edit the content using the TinyMCE editor. It also provides an Image and File browser to help you manage the Paperclipped assets.

Features

• Allows you to specify in Radiant admin which pages appear in the sitemap;
• Gives you the possibility to set the change_frequency and priority per page.

Check out the source code on github.

For installation and configuration details visit the Radiant Sitemap XML Extension documentation page.

First, of course you will need to set up a new Radiant project and install the Radiant Mailer Extension. You can checkout the repository I made for this post on github.

We’re using Andrew Tetlaw’s validation.js. You can download it here.

Now, that you have the project ready, let’s create a Contact page in Radiant. This is a Mailer page so you need to create a mailer page part with the following content:

  
    subject: From the website of Whatever
    from: noreply@example.com
    redirect_to: /contact/thank-you
    recipients:
      - one@one.com
      - two@two.com
  

Create the email form:

  
    <div id="flash" style="display:none;"></div>
    <r:mailer:form id="mailer-form">
      <label for="name">Name:</label><br/>
      <r:mailer:text name="name" /><br/>

      <label for="email">Email:</label><br/>
      <r:mailer:text name="email" /><br/>

      <label for="message">Message:</label><br/>
      <r:mailer:textarea name="message" /> <br/>

      <input type="submit" value="Send" />
    </r:mailer:form>
  

Great, we have the email form ready and the Radiant Mailer configured to use. Let’s start adding the Javascript. In your layout, link to the prototype.js and validation.js.

  
    <script type="text/javascript" src="/javascripts/prototype.js"></script>
    <script type="text/javascript" src="/javascripts/validation.js"></script>
  

In order the activate validation on the form you need a little Javascript snippet the will pass the form’s id attribute and will show the flash. You can put it in the layout also:

  <script type="text/javascript">
    function FormValidationCallback(passed_validation, form) {
       if (!passed_validation) {
         $('flash').update('<div class="error">The form contains errors!</div>');
         $('flash').show();
       } else {
         $('flash').hide();
       }
      }
      document.observe("dom:loaded", function () {
        new Validation($('mailer-form'), {onFormValidate: FormValidationCallback});
      });
  </script>

To activate validation on certain fields you just need to ad the proper class. Here’s the list of classes available to add to your field elements:

• required (not blank)
• validate-number (a valid number)
• validate-digits (digits only)
• validate-alpha (letters only)
• validate-alphanum (only letters and numbers)
• validate-date (a valid date value)
• validate-email (a valid email address)
• validate-url (a valid URL)
• validate-date-au (a date formatted as; dd/mm/yyyy)
• validate-currency-dollar (a valid dollar value)
• validate-selection (first option e.g. ‘Select one…’ is not selected option)
• validate-one-required (At least one textbox/radio element must be selected in a group)

  
    <r:mailer:text name="name" class="required" />
  

The validation library uses CSS classes to indicate validation status. Let’s style them a little:

  
    div.error {
      background:#CC0000 url(/images/site/exclamation.png) no-repeat 10px 5px;
      padding:5px 10px 5px 30px;
      color:#FFF;
      font-weight:bold;
      border:2px solid #CCCC99;
      margin:10px 0 5px 10px;
    }
    .validation-advice {
      background:#FFF url(/images/site/exclamation_advice.png) no-repeat left 5px;
      color:#9E2522;
      font-size:85%;
      padding:8px 0 5px 22px;
    }
  

You have here a screenshot of the validated form:

This about covers it. You can find out more about the options validate.js library gives you on Andrew Tetlaw’s blog. And you can see a working example of this technique on our company’s contact form.

Besides the possibility to save posted form fields and entire email messages to the database and export data to CSV and XLS, now it saves e-mail attachments using paperclip. Any attachments that the email might have will be saved on the file system. They can be downloaded from the details page of every record.

Also, the extension got thoroughly tested using Cucumber and webrat/email_spec.

Check out the source code on github.

For installation and configuration details visit the Radiant Database Mailer Extension documentation page.

But there is a little problem with the minified versions of the CSS files on IE browsers (of course):

This CSS statement:

1
2
3

  #test { 
    border: 1px solid #000000;
    }

Is minified like this:

1

  #test{border:1px solid#000;}

Which for some reason is misinterpreted by IE browsers, which don’t apply the correct styles.

The simple solution is to break down the border statement like this:

1
2
3
4
5

  #test {
    border-width: 1px;
    border-style: solid;
    border-color: #000000;
  }

This problem might appear also on some other CSS statements, I didn’t checked, but if something doesn’t look right on IE this might be the problem (among a lot others).