Example of unusual integration of GARS and vBadvanced

[convergent]

I've been asking questions in here and the vBadvanced forum to try and accomplish something that will help my site. What I've done is taken the CMPS - GARS add-on from here and modified it to create product pages. I'm actually using CMPS to show GARS information, rather than doing it in a GARS article.

Main page here... nothing that unusual, but the news is from the GARS-CMPS add on... http://pdaphonehome.com

Product selection page... this is not done yet, but I wanted to throw it out for comment... what this is doing is pulling GARS articles and showing only the header image and the title... I also created a filter to narrow the searchs... will be adding more filters and more stuff on this page, and probably taking a small block of it to the home page. http://pdaphonehome.com/?page=info

From that page, you can select a product and you'll get a page that is a CMPS page, fed completely from GARS data. All the product pages are just one page defined in CMPS, and the different GARS threads feed the modules to tell it what forums to pull from, what specs to show, and what links to add. Here is an example if you don't get there from above. http://pdaphonehome.com/?page=spec&d=dash

I just wanted to share this because it shows how powerful GARS is.

Note - I am having some CSS issues with Firefox that cause the specs table not to show correctly... if anyone has a clue what might be causing it, please let me know.

[Ramses]

You're right gars is very powerful, thanks for the examples, it gives me some new ideas how I can improve my sites :)

[The Geek]

Great job there :D

[convergent]

Thanks... I have a lot more to do on this, but once I figured out that it was conceptually possible, now I can proceed with exploiting it more. I think the nice thing here is that I'm trying to stick with using products instead of doing the whole thing custom...which will hopefully allow me to keep upgrading vB, vBa, and GARS without breaking things. I do need to make sure that I don't get over the top on the number of queries it takes to generate a page, however.

[Hornstar6969]

Yeah I wish I could do some extra things with it, i know it has the power to do it, but i just dont know where to start.

[convergent]

Start with the CMPS-GARS add-on, and then just start tweaking it.... If you do it with a test page and test forum, then you can't really mess anything up. If it doesn't work, got back and try again.