Why does my developer keep telling me,â€Your CMS can’t do that.â€? We feel your pain, and we have the solution.

“As an agency, we love to dream up big ideas and create unique and functional websites for our clients. The team at Dialogs not only helps us figure out how to make these ideas come to life, but the software enables our concepts to perform as we envision, without restrictions.”

— Alex W., Creative Professional

Dialogs on Facebook.

Building Dialogs Lists to get the most out of your content.

A unique feature of Dialogs is the use of content Lists that ensure proper formatting of small pieces of content, allowing it to be displayed in multiple places in various ways. List content can:

  • differentiate content for each user
  • add flexibility to how you present your content
  • create a dynamic user experience
  • increase the productivity of content manager

Here is how Dialogs Lists work:

  • A List can contain a variety of fields including headings, body copy, or visual assets. The database fields of a List are configured by the developer to match the desired content.
  • Each appearance of List content can have its own unique design or formatting. The developer controls this behavior by creating List Templates that define which content is displayed, the order items are displayed, the design or layout for the List item, etc.
    • There is no limit to the number of List Templates that can be created.
    • A List item can be displayed in more than one location, and each appearance can have a different design and display different parts if the List item. For example, a List item may appear in one area only as a headline, appear in a related arae as a headline, date, and short summary, and appear on a detail area as a complex article including detailed text and graphics.
  • Lists and List Templates are efficient Dialogs structures taking only minutes to create and configure by a developer. It is not uncommon for a Dialogs project to have dozens of defined Lists.
  • List Templates can control textual content, graphic content, or entire content areas such as banners or badges. Dialogs developers configure Lists and List Templates to:
    • store and present multiple "items" of content with a common set of parameters or fields
    • randomize content in specific areas of a page
    • personalize content
    • populate drop-down menus for data entry on other Lists
    • contain PHP code for inclusion on a page (for security reasons, direct entry of PHP code in Pages is prohibited).
  • List items may be easily tagged so the List items can appear with related content.
  • The Pages List has specialized functionality but in other respects behaves like any other List.
  • Internally Dialogs Lists are stored as MySQL database tables.

Lists should be used to manage content for:

  • a series of similarly formatted items of information (e.g., individual blog posts, news releases, job openings, events, promotions, products, services, etc.)
  • information that may be re-used in multiple locations
  • tight presentation control over user-entered information - the content editor isn't done until all fields are complete.

For more detailed information about how to develop in Dialogs, read our knowledge base and function reference.