programmable block?

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I work for a design/hosting company that specializes in hand-holding; we typically do site updates on behalf of the client.
We are in the process of evaluating CMSs because our old one is clunky and requires a lot of hacking these days. I stumbled on to C5 and immediately felt that it could bring a lot of value to our organization.

I created a static site very quickly, but I wanted to add a feature and it wasn't obvious to me how to go about doing it in C5 (short of hacking the core).

The feature is this: I want to show customer testimonials. The way it will work is, on the sidebar of every page in the site, one random customer quote will be displayed (pulled from a database of many quotes).

The first question was with global content, there didn't appear to be any way to establish that, but I see that is a feature request that is being worked on, fantastic.

So really the only question is how do I make a content block that contains logic?

At this point in time, I am assuming C5 (the UI) doesn't have this functionality, so I would want to create a model and modify the theme file(s).

I just wanted to get opinions, is it common and/or kosher to inject your own php into the theme files (default.php) ? Or have I got the completely wrong idea?

Thanks, Curt

curtis
 
frz replied on at Permalink Reply
frz
check out page defaults - they let an admin place content in one place and have it show up everywhere.

check out the developer docs in the help section, they explain how you can make a block..

you might make a single block where you could cycle randomly through content...

You might put some code in a template to just randomly display 1 block in a block area instead of all of em..

you could actually buy the advertising block add on and instead of putting banner ads in it, put your testimonials.. that would work perfectly.
curtis replied on at Permalink Reply
curtis
Thanks for the lightning-fast response!