CMS Made Simple Forums

Hey Guys,

I am looking to change an existing php site over to CMS. I have read through the various tutorials on the site and I am very hopeful I will be able to do this. As this is my first time doing this, I had a couple of questions that I hoped you guys might help me with:

Themes
I looked at the themes download page and while there are some cool themes available to download, none that match the existing look and feel of the site I need to migrate. Can you suggest other sites that I look for good themes?

Here is a link to the site I am trying to migrate:
http://www.treeoflife.ie/

Do you guys know of a theme I can download that might match this deisgn in particular the left navigation functionality?

If I don't find a compatible theme, what is the best way to approach this migration? Should I be looking at taking the existing stylesheets from the site, re-creating them in CMS and then try to change around one of the existing templates, menus etc so that they look similar enough to the original site?
Take for example the left navigation, it has .php and a javascript include files, will it be difficult to migrate and get working in CMS?

I am just looking for the easiest way to complete this migration successfully so any advice would be great.

Thanks,

Aidan

I would use your current stylesheet and tweak  whatever needs to be tweaked ones i moved over in CMSMS. I would think your be 90 percent done just copy/pasting your stylesheet.

Then place your div tags in the chosen CMSMS template (Use a copy of the one CMSMS already has set up as default).

The only problem i see in the menu is Treatments as the submenu points to anchors on the page, but i'm sure someone can bid in on a solutions to that. But i would just start moving pages over to CMSMS.

For all the items you have on each page like Treatments and Classes, i would use the News module setting different categories and calling the correct one depending on the page.

Hope that help you a little?

Hi Webform,

Thanks for the advice.

Just a question with regard to the left navigation. I will set up the treatments and classes pages to have news categories. That's no problem, but how do you suggest I replicate the functionality of the existing left nav? When you click on the either of these links the sub menu appears below the main link name. The existing site using a javascript file to complete this. Can I just add this JS file and make a call to it from the default template?

Or is there a CMSMS menu I can import that will work in this manner?

Thanks

Aidan

Well! I think that bit is more tricky as your actually do not point to pages but anchors in your submenu. Otherwise it would be easy as CMSMS comes the sample menus doing the job for you.

Maybe you can use "User Defined Tags" to make your own query and use in the menu to call the right anchor

Sorry my answer is so vague!

Actually that would be easy...

You would "Add Content" and make the content type a link to the anchor in the page and put it under the first level/page you have the anchors in...

Menu manager will go thru your page structure and make your menu ul li of links...

Then in your menu tag use collapse="1" so it only shows the children of the page your on...

When I looked at your diff. top level pages to see the expansion/collapse it seemed jump, the whole menu expanded for a second then when the page was loaded it was fine, imho it will work in a smoother fashion with CMSMS...

What you are doing in essence is just like the default install menu is set up...

http://cmsmsdemo.multiintech.com/

Welcome to CMSMS...