Establishing CMS made simple in existing site

vicksm · Post by **vicksm** » Wed Oct 06, 2004 8:31 am

Hi
I feel like a total dunce as I can't find any questions relating to this anywhere else, so it must be self explanatory to everyone else!

I have an existing site, but I really don't know where to start with making it editable through CMS MS. I have successfully installed the application (

) to the site, but now don't know how to apply it to my pages.

I have successfully created a template, but am unsure as to how I upload it to the relevant pages of the site so the changes made from the admin system are applied.

Does anyone know if there is anything written that would take me through the process?

Failing that, I have one specific question which may help me get started:

How do I apply the content management to the home page of the site. If I simply make my home page the default in the CMS, it isn't the main index page for the website, but for the CMS sub directory.

From here, I think the rest will follow as I think I understand the hierarchy.

Thanks in advance for any help!

Vicks

leen · Post by **leen** » Wed Oct 06, 2004 11:12 pm

vicksm wrote:I have an existing site, but I really don't know where to start with making it editable through CMS MS. I have successfully installed the application ( :D ) to the site, but now don't know how to apply it to my pages. :roll:

I have successfully created a template, but am unsure as to how I upload it to the relevant pages of the site so the changes made from the admin system are applied.

Does anyone know if there is anything written that would take me through the process?

Not that I know of.

Failing that, I have one specific question which may help me get started:

How do I apply the content management to the home page of the site. If I simply make my home page the default in the CMS, it isn't the main index page for the website, but for the CMS sub directory.

Move the entire contents of the CMS subdirectory 1 level up.

From here, I think the rest will follow as I think I understand the hierarchy.

Did you follow the directions that are in the last paragraph of the file called INSTALL?

1) Point your browser to the admin/ directory, e.g. http://localhost/admin/[/list:u] A login page appears.
- 2) Enter as username 'admin', and as password 'admin', and click on [Submit].[/list:u] Now the admin page appears. If you have questions about the admin page, feel free to ask them here. :)
  
  Cheers,
  
  Leen

vicksm · Post by **vicksm** » Sat Oct 09, 2004 7:40 am

Hi Leen

Thank you for your reply and your tips. The CMS directory currently sits alongside my main website files. ie. www.domainname.com/cmsms/ so I don't know that I can move it up any further.

I have followed all the install instructions and am happy with the way the actual admin system is working once I log in, but am just unclear as to how I apply it to the index.htm page of the site.

Are you suggesting that I should REMOVE the files from the CMSMS folder totally and put them into the root folder of my website. Will that not screw up all the references to them from MySql?

I guess accessing the admin site will then become: www.domainname.com/admin.

Thank you.

Vicky

Thijs · Post by **Thijs** » Mon Oct 11, 2004 2:02 pm

Hi Vicky,

The point is that you will not publish changes to you index.htm page. Rather, /cmsms/index.php will generate all the pages for you, depending on the parameters given (These can be made to look as different page-URLs by using a trick, but that's another story).

The way to go about making webpages is the following:

1. Determine in a webpage which part is layout and which part is content.
2. Remove the content and replace with {content}
3. Create a new template in CMSms under "Page Template" and copy this page to the content box of your template. Congratulations, you now have a working template! Let's make some pages with it:
5. Create a new page in CMSms under "Page Management" and set the template to the one you have just made
6. Now edit the page and fill in some text using the text editor. In the rendered page, this will be placed at the position where the {content} tag used was in the template

And that is basically it

. There are more tags you can use in your template, one for the stylesheet {stylesheet}, one for the menu {dhtmlmenu}. The best way to learn is play around in the administration, try to understand the examples that come with CMSms and see how changes affect the your CMS-ed website

vicksm · Post by **vicksm** » Mon Oct 11, 2004 2:26 pm

Thanks Thijs

This is all really clear, and I have a working template which I'm totally comfortable with. The only thing is, I'm sure I'm missing a trick, in that I'm struggling to understand why I can't edit my home page with this.

Maybe if I go through the installation process again, but this time don't put all the CMS files in a separate folder, so they actually sit in the root directory, so when people access www.mydomain.com they see the text which I'm able to update through the CMS application?

Thanks

Vicky

leen · Post by **leen** » Mon Oct 11, 2004 2:45 pm

Hi Vicky,

vicksm wrote:The only thing is, I'm sure I'm missing a trick, in that I'm struggling to understand why I can't edit my home page with this.

Unless the menu url points to an external link (external = outside CMS), the content is stored in a database.

To convert your website to CMS, you currently would have to put the content of your pages in CMS.

vicksm wrote:Maybe if I go through the installation process again, but this time don't put all the CMS files in a separate folder, so they actually sit in the root directory, so when people access www.mydomain.com they see the text which I'm able to update through the CMS application?

Yes.

As you have it now, the pages that are in CMS are accessible under http://www.mydomain.com/cmsms/.

If you want the CMS pages to be accessible via http://www.mydomain.com/, then you have to install CMS into the root directory of your webserver.

Cheers,

Leen

Thijs · Post by **Thijs** » Mon Oct 11, 2004 2:48 pm

Hi Vicky,

I think that would be the easiest way to make things work. There is at least one other trick you could use (like making a rewrite rule that makes www.mydomain.com/cmsms/index.php look like www.mydomain.com/)
but this will take some experience

Also that the pages are generated through index.php, and on some server it is not used as a default page like index.html is.

Darn, Leen, you're too fast for me:D

vicksm · Post by **vicksm** » Mon Oct 11, 2004 2:52 pm

Thank you! I'll give it a try.

leen · Post by **leen** » Mon Oct 11, 2004 3:38 pm

Thijs wrote:Darn, Leen, you're too fast for me:D

After you've beaten me! ;P But I did give you ample time for it. ;)

Cheers,

Leen

Thijs · Post by **Thijs** » Mon Oct 11, 2004 4:06 pm

vicksm · Post by **vicksm** » Mon Oct 11, 2004 5:26 pm

Sorry to come back to you on this AGAIN! I've now uninstalled and reinstalled CMSMS into my root directory and having established the database and the changed the permissions on all the appropriate folders am receiving the following message from my index page, and from install.php:

Cannot create config.php, please change permissions to allow this

Any ideas?

Vicky

Anonymous · Post by **Anonymous** » Mon Oct 11, 2004 5:32 pm

vicksm wrote:Sorry to come back to you on this AGAIN!

Don't worry about that.

vicksm wrote:I've now uninstalled and reinstalled CMSMS into my root directory and having established the database and the changed the permissions on all the appropriate folders am receiving the following message from my index page, and from install.php:

Cannot create config.php, please change permissions to allow this

Any ideas?

Yes. The install process needs write access to config.php.

Here is how you should proceed:

1) Change the file permissions of config.php to read/write

2) Run install.php

3) Change the file permissions of config.php to read/only

Cheers,

Leen

vicksm · Post by **vicksm** » Mon Oct 11, 2004 6:03 pm

But config.php doesn't exist yet!

Thijs · Post by **Thijs** » Mon Oct 11, 2004 8:45 pm

Please follow the steps outlined in INSTALL. It is really all in there:

1. Untar the source package to document root dir or your webserver
- cd DOCUMENT_ROOT
- tar xvfz cms-VERSION.tar.gz
OR
1. Check out the latest version from subversion
- svn co http://svn.wishy.org/cms/cms/trunk

----- If your webserver has write access to your new CMS directory you can skip step 2 ------
2. create an empty config.php file and make it writable by your webserver's user:

- touch config.php
- chmod 666 config.php

3. Create the cms database and grant a user rights to use it:
login to mysql: mysql -u root -p
create database cms;
grant all privileges on cms.* to cms_user@localhost identified by 'cms_pass';
quit

4. Optionally install the BB Code Parser. There is a flag in config.php where you can
turn this feature on/off. The install.php file will set this for you.
- pear install HTML_BBCodeParser

5. Fix the permissions on the cache and template compilation directories so the web server has access to them.

- chmod 777 smarty/cms/templates_c
- chmod 777 smarty/cms/cache
- chmod 777 uploads
- chmod 777 uploads/images

6. Open up your new CMS site in your webbrowser and you will be guided through a short install.

7. After install, for security sake, you should set your config.php back to a read-only state.

- chmod 444 config.php

Admin features including user management, template management, section management, and of course
content management can all be accessed at your CMSROOT/admin.

vicksm · Post by **vicksm** » Tue Oct 12, 2004 7:31 am

Thank you - all sorted! Thanks for your patience.

Vicky

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