CMS Made Simple Forums

Does anybody know of anybody sites that give away or sell templates, I've looked on google and had no luck

You can make a look here

http://themes.cmsmadesimple.org/Full_Themes.html

But you can take every other existing template (e.g. from oswd.org) and transform it to a cmsms template. There exists a video tutorial how to do it

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

That sounds great. Basically i am going to buy a commercial template from templatemonster.com

Just before I start can you just confirm what type of template I should purchase, im presuming i want a css based site template is that correct?

Many thanks for your help.

Yes, CSS based sites are the easiest to use.  I build my site (http://www.mngujaratisamaj.org) off a complete CSS based site. It will make it much easier to do. Plus, all sites should be CSS based nowadays, so if you are going to make a CMSms site, do it once and do it right!

One thing that worked for was to use the default template (Left sidebar something...) and just copy/paste my new code into that one - this way I was able to preserve the links to it. Watch the video tutorial mentioned above and follow each step.

My template took less than 1hr. Good luck

Not sure what you mean with "what type of template" ... the easiest way is to get html, css and image files of template you want. So you can use suggested video tutorial to transform it.

It's a little bit harder to transform a layout from a psd file .

ok guys thanks for your help,

I'm going to take the plunge and try it.

can anyboddy recommend any good template sites apart from template monster?

Please look at this small collection

http://www.oswd.org
http://opendesigns.org/
http://www.free-css-templates.com/
http://www.styleshout.com/
http://templates.arcsin.se/
http://www.templateworld.com/
http://www.4templates.com/
http://www.solucija.com/
http://www.dotcomwebdesign.com/

I also have and make templates...

We had our site template (http://www.mngujaratisamaj.org) created by web designers at OnyxLogix. They did ours for free (volunteering), but I believe they charge less that $80 for a CMSms template. Their web: http://www.onyxlogix.com.

Best of Luck!

ok i've been looking on the templates on template monster and a number of them have flash menus,

how would i go about incorporating them into cmsms, is this at all possible or should I look for a template with a normal menu, is there any way of telling what template would be compatible with cmsms?

I would stay away from flash menu templates. Two reasons:

1. CMSms cannot make links in a flash file, at least not yet. It can only make links into CSS based menues or regular text menus.

2. From an SEO perspective, flash menus are a poor choice. Search bots cannot get links from a flash menu, only a regular CSS or text menu. This will hurt your search results severely. Take my example: We had our site up since 2005, tons of backlinks and visitors, yet we had a page rank of 0. I changed our template from a flash menu to a regular menu and within a month or two our ranking went to 2/10.

Get a CSS-based template.

One of the huge advantages that CMSMS has over other CMS systems like DNN or Joomla is the flexibility it offers for designers vis-a-vis smarty tags. It truly ease in a class by itself when it comes to ease of use, even for new designers.

Virtually any web design that can be conceived, regardless of complexity and with any elements including flash, can be applied to a CMSMS system (although I agree with an earlier post, Flash should not be used for navigation, esp with the great dynamic SEO friendly navigation that CMSMS comes with)....pretty much all I do anymore is develop custom designs for CMSMS or apply customizable templates that I've designed to CMSMS sites. If you would like to take a look at some designs and templates I've done as examples for your own project you can email me.

I would discourage you from using generic Templates, such as sold at templatemonster, because they are generally poorly coded (in my opinion) and for a new designer they can teach bad habits. With the ease of using smarty tags I would suggest using some of the online resources at CMSMS and try building something from scratch, using the standard template designs as guides.

While pure CSS is cool, if you're relatively new to designing I would recommend you start using tables styled with CSS either inline or using an external style sheet as it's a more visual way to design and understand the basic concepts of layout.

Good luck

Hi Casidougul,

The reason we chose template monster is because we cant seem to find any other good templates elsewhere. I was very disappointed when i found out pretty much all of the sites on TM have flash menus. I'm very strict with SEO.

We run a print and sign making company and basically the guys all have agreed they want the site to be styled like something apple would have made. I guess the main reason is because our designer uses macs himself and wants to reflect that on our site. The main requirement is the have the black rounded menu buttons like on apples previous sites,

Is this something you could help us with?

leerees wrote: We run a print and sign making company and basically the guys all have agreed they want the site to be styled like something apple would have made. I guess the main reason is because our designer uses macs himself and wants to reflect that on our site. The main requirement is the have the black rounded menu buttons like on apples previous sites,

Is this something you could help us with?

Yes. I would be happy to give you a basic CMSMS design I've done to play with.

Also, virtually any graphic concept you have--designed in Photoshop, hand drawn, whatever--we can code to XHTML and optimize for CMSMS. You can see some of our past work by clicking on my screen name "casidougal" to the upper left of this post then clicking on the website in my profile.  If you're interested in discussing more it would probably be appropriate to take our conversation off this Forum...you can click on the email icon by my name to the top left of this post to contact me directly.

I'm sorry but I believe you should stay away from table based layout like the plague, it will not help you learn much and then you may have a harder time going to a CSS/div driven layout and iirc it makes it real hard on those that rely on screen readers as they have to read every td tr...

As seen in this screen shot from fangs, a screen reader emulator, of a table layout most all the grey areas are from the table layout and the whole thing is what gets read to the user...

Now a default install, Default Templates Explained, fang screen shot...

As far as apple style menu buttons have you seen...

http://www.multiintech.com/cmsms2/

then hit the golf or workflow pages then look at jumptabs all of these tab type menus are dynamically generated and the tabs grow width wise to the size of the text in them...

I have not come across a table layout that I can not be convert to CSS/div driven layout