CMS Made Simple Forums

Hi, I've successfully installed CMS and as a complete beginner to any kind of coding, I'm feeling somewhat proud that I've made it this far. Thank you for making it so simple.

Before I screw up any of the rest of it, I wanted to run a couple of questions past you, and forgive me if they're REALLY basic and you're thinking I should know better.

I already have an established site which I created in Dreamweaver which I'm wanting to use this CMS for and I'm not sure how I should best implement the management of the site. Should I convert all the pages to templates and copy the code to the template management section of the site?

And as I have already copied the CSS file to the CSS section, will the templates reference it from there, or do I need to include it in the bottom window of each template again.


Any pointers would be really appreciated.

Thanks

Vicks

Hello. I'm glad you got CMS up and running without any difficulty. That's a good thing.

As for conversion of an old site, think of it this way. Almost every site has a look for the entire site. This would be HTML that is repeated on every page, or at least a few. What makes the pages different is the content of the page. The HTML that doesn't change is the template.

So, really, what you need to do is figure out what HTML isn't changing and make a new template with that. The part of the template that contains the text that is different for every page should instead be replaced with {content}. So, now every page that uses that template will replace the {content} with it's actualy content.

Same thing with CSS. You can either take the CSS for that template and put it in the box underneath it, or, use the advanced method and add the CSS in the CSS management section. Keep in mind that if you do that, you need to then "attach" the CSS you created to the your template by hitting the CSS icon in the list templates page.

Also, in order for the CSS to actually be displayed, there needs to be a {stylesheet} tag put into the section of your template.

Hopefully this long rambling message helps to make a little more sense of what we're doing.

Thanks!

Thanks for your fast response and your patience! All seems pretty logical and the template now works well. The only other thing I should ask is how to ensure that a page overwrites the correct page on the old site. ie. can you dictate the url from CMS made simple?

I'm putting a link here to the site I'm talking about in case it makes it any easier for you to visualise what I'm trying to do... http://www.vw-oldskool-ac.co.uk/

Thank you!

Vicks

@vicksm
you asked some great questions.
im glad you asked many of them, cause they were also somethings i didnt understand, like the CSS part.

but, as always WISHY knows best.

thanks Wish.