Most popular blogging engines allow you to categorize your blog posts by month. This is a simple code snippet to achieve monthly archives in your Croogo installation. You can find the code and installation instructions in the link below. If you have any questions, comments or find a bug leave a comment on the code's page.

Croogo Monthly Archives

I got tired of hand writing slugs for my blog posts, I am used to using the acts_as_sluggable behavior. I thought about implementing the behavior into Croogo but realized this might be better implemented as some simple Javascript. Initially I wrote a simple find and replace function with Javascript that converted spaces to hyphens but realized it didn't take into account special characters or more than one space so I did a quick search on Google and came across the jQuery Slug Plugin. It took me about 2 minutes to download and implement.

All you need to do is download the plugin and place it into your webroot/js directory and then modify a few lines in app/views/nodes/admin_add.ctp. The changes I made are below.

$javascript->link(array('nodes', 'jquery.slug'), false);

Include the jQuery slug plugin at the top of the page.

<script type="text/javascript">
$(document).ready(function(){
    $("#title").slug({
        slug:'permalink',
    });
});
</script>

Set up the plugin and let it know the title field's ID and the class of the slug field.

echo $form->input('title', array('id' => 'title'));
echo $form->input('slug', array('class' => 'permalink'));

Add an ID to the title field and a classname to the slug field. That's about it, hope this saves you some time when you are writing your next article.

I have been busy at work implementing new features into the site. Croogo is an amazing piece of software for anyone who knows a little CakePHP. It gives you the CMS as a base and let's you extend to your hearts content, something I was never really able to do with Wordpress. Below is a list of features that I have implemented.

• Featured post on home page
• Full text search for blog articles
• Tag cloud
• Archives for blog articles
• Possibly related posts for blog articles

If anyone is interested in the code for the features not already documented let me know and I will write up a blog post. Stay tuned I will be releasing my second Croogo theme soon.

Update: September 4th, 2010

I have released this theme for Croogo 1.3.2 and should be forward compatible. Please comment on the new post for questions and problems.

http://andrw.net/blog/simple-theme-released-for-croogo-132

Here it is. My first theme release for Croogo. Not sure how many people out there are using Croogo yet but it's showing a lot of potential and it's especially good news if you are already a CakePHP developer. Ensure that you read the README file included in the archive as it explains how to get things like full text searching and the tag cloud working. 

I already have a few ideas for my second theme so stay tuned and as always if you have any questions drop me a line in the comments.

Preview: Simple Croogo Theme

Update November 17th

You can now test out the theme above by clicking here. If you want to go back to the normal theme just head back to this post and click here, or end you browsing session.

Original Post

This is a preview of the new theme I am working on for the Croogo CMS. It should be released some time within the next week or so. I will be releasing it for free and it can be used for any type of personal or commercial project. It will include search functionality and tag clouds similar to the current implementation on my site.

Let me know what you think and if you would like to see some changes leave a comment and I will try and implement them.