How To Get Started

[PhenixDesigns]

Alrighty...  so here goes.

I'm going to be making a few websites for clients in the near future.  They aren't too computer savvy, so I wanted the site to be easy for them to update on their own.  Someone suggested CMS to me yesterday, so today I set out on a quest to find out what it was.  I did, and it seems pretty swell.  I downloaded CMSms, installed it onto my server, and got it set up there.

I've already got a website of my own built, which I did without CMS.  What I wanted to do was to install CMSms onto my server and have to ability to update my site through CMSms.

I don't really know what I'm doing, though.  Is there a way to be able to use my pre-existing pages with CMSms?

Also...  I don't know, I guess I'm just completely confused by the whole thing.  In the "Pages" section of the "Content" menu, there is a home file...  but it's got an ugly address (http://phenixdesigns.net/cmsmadesimple- ... ?page=home).  How would I make that home file the index file of phenixdesigns.net?

I realize that these may seem like silly questions, so please bear with me.  I'm just learning (literally, today's my first day!  heh) about CMS, and this system seemed like a really easy, slick way to take care of things.  If I've somehow missed a question like this elsewhere on the forums, please point me to that.  Otherwise, feel free to lend advice and ridicule to the noobiest noob of them all.

[calguy1000]

CMS Made Simple is a content management package.  it does not manage 'existing' static sites, it manages its own sites.  In order to manage your site, you would have to:

a) Create/Modify one or more 'Page Templates' under 'Layout >> Templates' that define the structure of the page
b) Create/modify and attach stylesheets to the said page template
c) Create/modify pages that use the templates created in step a

This is an iterative process.  there are tutorials on how to build templates, in the 'documentation' section, but this is not an 'editor' it is not designed to allow you to edit existing .html files, it's a content management system and houses everything needed to build a web page/web site within it's database.

Making the URL of you web pages 'pretty' is a topic that's discussed at length in the forum.

I guess you've got some reading to do.

[PhenixDesigns]

Okay, so one of my questions is answered.  Neato.

I have seen something about pretty URLs briefly, but wasn't sure if that was referring to the actual site address or just admin stuff.

So, you build a template in the CMS system.  Let's say my site is set up like the one I have at my page (http://www.phenixdesigns.net).  It's basically just a table with HTML and CSS.

The template I make in CMS - would it just be the table information without any content?  Just the HTML of the table itself?  And then, for each page, I apply that template to it?

I do have quite a bit of reading to do, heh  I've been doing nothing but reading about Actionscript, XML, and Javascript the past week.  The brain may start to melt soon, but I'm learning a whole lot of stuff, which is a good enough reward for me.

Thanks for the quick reply!

[Dr.CSS]

Your design can be used, not that I would ever use a table based layout, but i'm a snob like that  ...


{content}


{content block="sidebar"}


As for the menu you may have to make a new menu template to spit out links w/o ul li...

Then...

{menu template="nameofnewtemplate"}