Is there a step-by-step guide for help newbies get started ...

[sarah_h]

Hi All,

I've read all the wiki's and many, many posts here. I've spent the last couple of days experimenting with CMS MS 0.12.1 and find parts of it a little confusing. Particularly the template/stylesheet associations. So I was hoping that someone could help me with a step-by-step guide to getting started. As I see it it's like this (I'd like to start from scratch with my own templates/stylesheets etc.):

1. Create template

2. Create Stylesheets

3. Somehow make the associations between them, here it gets foggy

4. Make content

5. don't know what else!

I'm looking for a workflow that I can understand and follow. I'm o.k. at coding etc. it's just the CMS MS proceedures I need to figure.

Can anyone help?

Sarah

[hotaru]

Someone else could probably answer this far better than me, but I'll give it a shot anyway. 

I can't give you a walkthrough, but for #3 - to associate your stylesheets to your template, go to the Template screen and click the little yellow "CSS" image next to the template you want to associate it with. You'll go to a screen that says "Current Associations" and it will show you all the stylesheets associated with that template. You can then add or delete the association as you see fit (to delete the actual *stylesheet* itself you go to the stylesheet page)

... Or are you thinking of how to connect the formatting of specific elements (i.e. the footer should have this background color and use this font) to your template? You do this with "div"s.

So, within the sample templates from installation there's:

Code: Select all

   <!-- Start Footer -->
   <div id="footer" class="clearfix">
      {global_content name='footer'}
   </div>
   <!-- End Footer -->

And in the "Layout" stylesheet there's:

Code: Select all

    /* FOOTER */
       div#footer {

        }

        div#footer p {
            font-size: 0.8em;
            margin: 0;
            padding: 15px;
            text-align: center;
        }
    /* END FOOTER */

And in the "Colours" stylesheet:

Code: Select all

	div#footer {
		color: #fff;
		background-color: #385C72;
		}

(You don't have to seperate out the colors into a seperate stylesheet from the rest of the formatting, but it makes it easier if you want to use the same colors across different templates.)

Hope one of these answers applies to at least one of your questions!

[sarah_h]

Thank you, thank you Rhug and hotaru for taking the time to so thoroughly explain things, this sure is a friendly forum! Ok, I've read through your posts and checked the links you provided and I'm beginning to see clearly, particularly the bit about linking externally to stylesheets. I'm beginning to realise that the templates could (I'm presuming) be more or less HTML with a few tags to specify where the content is to be placed? I started a site from scratch so I feel I can learn more this way but I don't have a site up remotely yet but I'm working on it.

An area of frustration for me now are the menu's, so as not to repeat myself, here is my post:

http://forum.cmsmadesimple.org/index.ph ... 320.0.html

I feel I must repeat my thanks to you for spending your time helping me.

Sarah

p.s. I'm sure I'll have a few more questions!!

[sarah_h]

Wow, Rhug, that's fantistic, the code you've posted here has really cleared my mind and it was what I needed to give me a clear idea of what I need to do to move forward. Thank you so much. The menu manager confuses me though, particularly how do I create a copy of an existing menu so I can play with it?

Once again thanks you Rhug for your time and effort, BTW your test site looks beautiful!

Sarah

[sarah_h]

I supposed I'm a little foggy about this but CMS MS comes with about 4 or 5 menus i.e. bulletmenu.tpl, cssmenu.tpl etc. I was just wondering whether I could either copy an existing menu type and muck around with it or even create another menu type, or don't I need to as I can style them however I want? Perhaps I'm missing the point!

[Dr.CSS]

ok when you get to Layout » Menu Manager there are two tabs one says Database Templates usualy empty on install, second one says File Templates, clik that one, you see some menus with the .tpl, at the far right you see what looks like two pieces of paper on top of each other clik that and it will ask you to name it, give it a name and clik submit, it takes you back to the first tab and you see your newly named menu, now you can 'muck' around with it. That's how i made my Imap menus, as i needed more 'id' names so i could call out diff. CSS for each link.

    mark

this is what one looks like

{* CSS classes used in this template:
.current - The current page in the vertical (local) menu.
.bullet_sectionheader - To style section header
hr.separator - To style the ruler for the separator *}
{if $count > 0}

{foreach from=$nodelist item=node}
{if $node->depth > $node->prevdepth}
{repeat string="" times=$node->depth-$node->prevdepth}
{elseif $node->depth prevdepth}

{repeat string="" times=$node->prevdepth-$node->depth}

{elseif $node->index > 0}
{/if}
{if $node->current == true}
url}"{if $node->target ne ""} target="{$node->target}"{/if}>{$node->menutext}
{elseif $node->type == 'sectionheader'}
{$node->menutext}
{elseif $node->type == 'separator'}

{else}
url}"{if $node->target ne ""} target="{$node->target}"{/if}>{$node->menutext}{/if}
{/foreach}

{repeat string="" times=$node->depth-2}

{/if}

[hotaru]

I think it takes a little time to get used to the menumanager if you're new at it (as I am too).

My understanding is (and someone please correct me if I'm wrong  ), if you want to change the basic "structure" of how the menu works, go to the menumanager and mess with the .tpl and such, like maksbud said.

To change the "look" of the menu - the width, the colors, the border, etc - , you can do this in the CSS. I know you're working from scratch, but for an example you can look at the demo site. Attached to each template you'll see stylesheets called "Nav-Horizontal" or "Nav-Vertical" that adjust the look of the menus when they're used with that template.

I was able to get my menu the way I wanted simply by changing the stylesheets, without ever doing anything in MenuManager.

[sarah_h]

Thanks so much for your detailed help and explanations. I managed to create another menu template like you mentioned Mark so I tried just to apply this new template to an existing page template. Here is the original template code for the menu:

{cms_module module='menumanager' template="ellnav-horiz.tpl" number_of_levels='1'}

And I changed it to look like this:

{cms_module module='menumanager' template="temp-horiz.tpl" number_of_levels='1'}

But now when I view the page I get this error:

string(83) "Smarty error: unable to read resource: "module_file_tpl:MenuManager;temp-horiz.tpl""

Is there a difference between the file templates and the database templates?

[tsw]

Is there a difference between the file templates and the database templates?

Yep, file templates end with .tpl and database templates dont

so when you create new database template and name it "mytmpl" you call it with "template='mytmpl'"

[sarah_h]

He-he, thanks, didn't see that one written anywhere!

Hey, just wanted to say thanks again to all you guys who've helped me with your comments and examples, I truly appriciate what you've done. It's sure friendly for newb's around here.

Now, let's see if I can put all this together and actually produce something worth looking at.

Sarah