matterhornpat, you are quite right.
I apologize for the lack of information. I was frustrated, but that doesn't excuse my vague manner of posting. I know how these things go on forums.
As a matter of fact, I just got it fixed. It turned out to be that either something happened to my database or I never imported the data - I just imported it, and boom! there was my site. I was looking in phpMyAdmin while setting up a new test CMSms install on the server when I noticed the database for my original production install had no tables. Bingo!
But, for sake of history, here's what happened before:
I made several attempts at uploading and getting my site working. What I did was export my database and zip up my CMSms files. The database I imported with phpMyAdmin and unzipped the files with cPanel file manager. And then I did a couple fresh creations of CMSms locally and repopulated them with content, templates, etc, and tried uploading those. But failed.
The install directory trick is something I saw mentioned elsewhere on the forum where it was suggested to upload the install directory from the CMSms release to the server and somewhat reinstall CMSms to get the paths in config.php correct. Which I tried and actually found correct paths with. But there was a database problem, too.
I think the first time I uploaded the site, I actually got things correct, but I hadn't cleared my cache before uploading, so that made some issues, it seems.