Cart before the horse - designed site now I need CMS!!!

[macgraphic]

First things first... Hi! I am Mark, a graphic designer from Scotland - (note I said graphic and not web).

I have designed a couple of sites - mainly using Photoshop then into Dreamweaver and converted to CSS, and I have gave the person I am designing them for a link to a dummy site for them to view it, before I had started they said they would not need to be able to update it themselves and were happy to just send me new text files/images every couple of months (would be a very static site), but now they have seen the sample page they have decided they like it, but now want to be able to edit the content on a number of pages themselves.
So... I have trawled the net, and ended up installing CMSMS on the server, but how can I set my CSS design as a template  with selected areas that they can update the text in - I have looked through some of the templates, and I cannot find anything that I feel I could modify well enough to be able to use.
I only wish they had told me before I had done all this that they would want to update it themselves - then I could have customised one of the many templates provided.

As my main area would be design for print, HTML is new to me, and CSS is even newer, so the thought of having to learn another coding language would just not be possible in the time I have available to me.

Any help would be gratefully received.

Ta,
Mark

[jmcgin51]

Welcome to the CMSMS community, Mark!

I was going to give you the bad news first, but then I realized I really couldn't think of any   What you want should be extremely easy to accomplish via CMSMS, because of the way that CMSMS separates content and formatting (HTML and CSS).  Remember that CMSMS uses the Smarty templating engine (http://www.smarty.net/).  This means that there are a number of Smarty tags that are used to replace/represent different HTML functions in your template or page.  For example, in your page template, you will probably paste the {content} tag.  This tag represents all the content on the page (well, you can have multiple {content} blocks if you want), and will provide an editable content area when you're editing a page.

Probably the best way to get started for you is to read this piece in the documentation:
http://wiki.cmsmadesimple.org/index.php ... ade_Simple

Work with that for a while, then post back if/when you have additional questions.

Also, when posting, you'll get the best responses if you follow the posting rules:
http://forum.cmsmadesimple.org/index.ph ... ,40.0.html

Have fun!

[Nullig]

This visual tutorial should get you started.

http://cmsmadesimple.org/uploads/media/ ... colate.htm

You can find more tutorials here:

http://wiki.cmsmadesimple.org/index.php/Main_Page

Nullig

[macgraphic]

Excellent, thanks!
your timing couldn't be better, just made a mug of coffee and got comfy, so I will look at them right now!

Cheers

[jmcgin51]

Mark - I had posted earlier with some additional links and suggestions, but it looks like my post got caught by Akismet.  Hopefully when it's released it will also be helpful.  In the meantime, Nullig's recommendations are excellent!

[macgraphic]

jmcgin51, I had noticed and had tried to read the reply, but when I came in to to the thread there was just my first post 
I thought there was some strange method of being able to read the posts on this forum.

Thanks for letting me know, and yeah Nullig's suggestion was very helpfull - especially the mint_chocolate.htm example - which I am trying to work through just now - pausing it and making each change etc to my own code.
At least I am trying this on my own site, which is under development - so I shouldn't be able to break anything, too much anyway 

I know this is the wrong place for this, but is it possible to have one copy of CMSMS on a server ( I have a VPS), and run different sites through it - each with their own users etc??
Just a thought?


Ta,
Mark

[jmcgin51]

I know this is the wrong place for this, but is it possible to have one copy of CMSMS on a server ( I have a VPS), and run different sites through it - each with their own users etc??
Just a thought?

Yes, but it's not something that the software is officially supposed to support.  If you search this forum for "multiple sites" or "multiple domains" etc, you'll find some information on this.  IIRC, it's not a simple process (at least in my way of thinking).

[Nullig]

I think most of the sites that are multiple are actually "sub-domains". It would be very tricky, not to mention code hackingly difficult, to maintain multiple domains on the same install.

Nullig

[macgraphic]

I think most of the sites that are multiple are actually "sub-domains". It would be very tricky, not to mention code hackingly difficult, to maintain multiple domains on the same install.

Nullig

mmm, me thinks... beggar that for a game of soldiers