Hello - VERY New (to CMSMS and web development in general)

[karenj2]

Hi all - First of all, I apologize if this is the wrong place to ask questions. I tried searching, but since I wasn't registered, I kept getting "you cannot search" messages.

Here is my brief back story: I work for a retail company at HQ, and our IT department has dumped the "keeping of the intranet" on me, because I know a tiny bit of HTML. (Self taught, but currently use Frontpage and Adobe's Dreamweaver.) On a daily basis, I receive "posting requests" from various departments, and it's my job to create the pages and make them look good.

I started searching for ***SOMETHING*** to make this easier, but so many places were "in the cloud" or too technical for me, so when I came across CMSMS, I was thrilled! I've looked through the demo, and it's very impressive, but I have a few questions. (I'm going to ask my IT department to check the technical requirements, but in the meanwhile I wanted to hopefully get answers from you, too.)

So, on to the questions:
1) In the demo, I saw that I could add content (as well as new categories/tabs), but when I went to add pictures, I could only select from what you had uploaded to the demo already. Was that just a limitation of the demo? I have departments that have content that is very graphic and link heavy - I'm hoping they can upload their own pictures.

2) In the demo, there were admin rights, editor rights, and designer rights... Is it possible to grant someone only editor rights to a particular category (i.e., their department)?

3) Our current intranet has a "Recent Updates" page, in which all of our (almost daily) announcements go, they also are manually coded to go on each department's "home" page. I know this is a stupid question, but if an editor (department head) posts something into their own page (in CMSMS), can I use a module(?) (like News) to automatically post it to the main page?

4) I have a design that I created in Adobe's HTML program - is it possible to somehow use that look in the CMSMS software? (I'd be happy to show it to someone if they'd like to create a theme out of it - at this moment, that's way above my ability level...)

Thank you for your help! I'm really hoping that this software will be the right fit for us! (One last question - if there's a good website/book for me to check out, so I don't sound so stupid, please let me know that, too!)

<--- just because he's cute!

[paulbaker]

1. Yes you can upload your own pics.

2. Yes. You will probably be a main admin, with access all areas. You can set up other admin accounts with more limited access if required. CMSMS is very flexible like that, you can be very specific.

3. Yes, news and all other modules use templates. You can call (for example) the latest 3 news items and display the titles and summary text boxes from each, with links to the full news item. Or 3 of the latest news items from category x, etc.

4. Yes you will need to convert your HTML design in to a page template. Not too hard once you look at the bare bones page template that comes with each new install. Insert tags which look like this: {title} and CMSMS then replaces your tags with dynamic content.

Lots of good CMSMS tutorials on the web which are only a Google search away.

Good luck and welcome

[Jeff]

1) In the demo, I saw that I could add content (as well as new categories/tabs), but when I went to add pictures, I could only select from what you had uploaded to the demo already. Was that just a limitation of the demo? I have departments that have content that is very graphic and link heavy - I'm hoping they can upload their own pictures.

The default WYSIWYG editor MicroTiny doesn't have the upload feature on its FilePicker(I believe it is planned to be added for 2.2 or soon after), but you can install TinyMCE or the soon to be release JMFilePicker that both have upload functionality within the content page.

2) In the demo, there were admin rights, editor rights, and designer rights... Is it possible to grant someone only editor rights to a particular category (i.e., their department)?

You can give groups or users rights to edit individual pages, I am not sure what you are referring to as categories.

3) Our current intranet has a "Recent Updates" page, in which all of our (almost daily) announcements go, they also are manually coded to go on each department's "home" page. I know this is a stupid question, but if an editor (department head) posts something into their own page (in CMSMS), can I use a module(?) (like News) to automatically post it to the main page?

You could have {News category="Dept1"} be displayed in the top of a department pages then on the Home page {News} which will pull from all categories. So your department Head post in their own Category of News and it will show in both places. (This is one way to do it, one nice thing about CMSms there are many way to do things).

4) I have a design that I created in Adobe's HTML program - is it possible to somehow use that look in the CMSMS software? (I'd be happy to show it to someone if they'd like to create a theme out of it - at this moment, that's way above my ability level...)

Yes, any HTML template (or HTML from Adode) can be use as a basis for a CMSms Template, that is why there are so few "CMS Made Simple Template" because you can use any HTML/HTML5 Template. Myself and others can help, there is a "Help Wanted" Section for request for paid work/projects.

(One last question - if there's a good website/book for me to check out, so I don't sound so stupid, please let me know that, too!)

-http://docs.cmsmadesimple.org/
-http://www.cmscanbesimple.org/
Older stuff
-http://www.cmsmadesimple.org/documentat ... tutorials/
-http://www1.cmscanbesimple.org/
-https://www.siteground.com/tutorials/cms_made_simple/

[karenj2]

Thank you so much! (To both of you!)

I will get reading the help links you gave me, and let my manager know that this might be possible!! Hopefully, our system can handle it! (Believe me, that is a big if - we are so far behind technologically!!)