Backdrop CMS Instructional Videos, 28 Sep 2021

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From YouTube: Backdrop CMS Modules: Simplify

Description

A short tour of the Simplify Module.

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Hello, my name is tim erickson. I can be found on the internet under the pseudonym of saint paul tim. I am here today on behalf of simplo uh part of my company triplo, to talk about the simplify module we can see here. The simplify module is maintained by peter anderson.

A

If we go to backdropcms.org the project page we can scroll through and we could read the sort of documentation and installations instructions, but I'm going to cover those. Today we can see that this was a drupal 7 module developed by mark schust and ported to backdrop by peter anderson and currently maintained by peter anderson.

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What the simplify module does is pretty straightforward.

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I have a backdrop site here that I spun up on backdropcms.org. It's a free demo site. Anyone can spin one up either to just poke around a backdrop or to try out things, it's a great way to try out modules or to create little screencasts, uh demonstrating how modules work. That's how I'm using it today and I have created a a website.

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I haven't done anything to it except add the simplify module already. Hopefully, you know how to do that and well, I haven't really even configured it yet. I did create a test user account, so I'm not user number one, I'm user number two! This is this uh user number one would be the default admin account that comes with the site. I created a second account. I called it test user.

A

This test user account has full uh access to do anything on the site and the scenario that you might want to use the simplify module is you have an organization, a business and you you've, given a number of people, ability to update, maybe post blog posts or update your content, you'd like to keep the editor experience as simple as possible for them.

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Well, there's a bunch of things we could do to do that, but a really simple one would be the simplify module if we go to create a post within backdrop with full admin privileges, you see a lot of tabs and stuff here that you may or may not need.

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Now. Some of these things would go away if you restricted this user's permissions. Maybe if you use the default editor role, that is now in backdrop, the default editor role doesn't have quite as many uh options and won't see quite as many tabs, but short of doing that.

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If you want to get rid of some of these things, you can, as an admin go over here, user interface, simplify and basically for nodes. There's also options for users, comments and taxonomy and blocks for any of those, but for nodes, which is what posts are. We can hide different fields from the content, editors and so in this case, I'm going to start out by hiding these url fields. Maybe that's the one in particular. I just feel like.

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I don't need I'd like to get rid of, so that my user doesn't have to deal with those or my content editor. So now, when my content, editor comes they scroll down and oh look at that, they still have that field. Well, what happened here is I'm going to demonstrate it to you by going to the permissions page.

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Where is that user accounts permissions? um And here, if we do a simplify, we go down to the simplify permissions and we see that administ I have. I have administer our permissions to administer, simplify. I also have view hidden fields, permission. This means that even the fields, I hide I'm going to be able to see. So I'm going to want to disable that now, if I had been administering this for say, site editors that have the editor role, I wouldn't have had to disable this because they they didn't. Have that permission.

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But I do- and I don't or- and I don't want to see these fields- and I don't want people with the same permission as me- to see those so I'm going to save my change. Basically we'll go back and double check, simplify yep. Now I don't have that role. Now. If I go to content, add post.

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We are going to see. Oh did I so I turned off that permission. Let's go back to simplify, make sure. Oh, that's not saved here, not sure what happened there, save configuration okay, I've removed the permission.

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So now, if I go add content post there, it is that field is gone and it could be that I don't you know if the default is set to publish now and- and I don't necessarily want to give people draft or schedule options, um let's see what else we, what are the other options we have well, we could promoted the formatting let's.

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Well, I'm going to do everything but the formatting options, although some of these uh weren't available to me anyways, maybe just because of the way the site was configured by default, but I turn all of those off. I come back to this form. I refresh the page boom. Now all those tabs are gone now. Look at this.

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I just have my title field, my tags, field, body and image. Now some people say well what about this? There's this little thing here that can be distracting or confusing. It's formatting options. Backdrop by default gives gives certain certainly admins the ability to choose between two different text filters and if I change those it'll change, my options here by the way filtered html basically means that you're allowed a limited number of html tags that you can use and anything else will get filtered out. That's what filtered html is raw.

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Html means you can put any html you want in here, and it's not going to filter anything out. Well, I could restrict permissions to use these different filters, but another option I have is to sort of simplify this. If I just don't want that field to be visible is to turn that off formatting options save configure come back here. We reload this page. Now now the page is even simpler. Look at that the formatting options is gone. It's a really clean and simple editor page.

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Really. This is what the simplify module does for you.

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It does the same thing on some other forms for users, comments, um taxonomy and blocks, and last but not least, if you're, if you are user, number one, uh in fact, I am user number or I have a window open as user number, one which is right here, user number, one is the original user um and even though we've turned off the ability to or we've turned off to see the field hidden fields, the uh user number one still sees all these fields because they are user number one and they have permission to do everything.

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So there is an advanced setting in the simplify module that lets. You override that and even hide these things for user number, one so down here. I hide for user number one and now, as user number one I go to that post, page and boom. I I see the same thing that everybody else does so that's a handy little feature just don't sort of lock yourself out of anything or restrict your access.

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What I would normally do, rather than that is leave, leave these kinds of things visible for user number one, but then create another admin account that I would use. If I want to log in and not have those distracting things, I only would log in as user number one. If I want to see everything, okay, I think we're going to leave it at that today.

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I try to keep these videos as short as I can, but I I'm not good at not talking anyways uh go. If you have any more questions uh come by uh simplo.site simplo.site is our url. We do have uh teamtriplow has youtube channel, which is where you're, probably getting this video, be sure to check out all our other backgroundcms.org backdrop, cms videos. Thank you very much. Bye.