CMS Made Simple Forums

I am a designer who has used Dreamweaver for years. Now I want to design dynamic, rather than static sites, and enable clients to edit, etc. without using Contribute. I am playing around with CMSmadesimple. Has anyone used this w/ Dreamweaver to cut down the learning curve?  If so, I'd like some tips and comments. Have you refined templates using Dreamweaver and then used "cut and paste" in CMSMS?  Thanks for any help!

Hi,

I would recommend to forget DW if you are using it as a WYSIWIG tool. If you code a website with CMSMS you have to dive into css and xhtml, seperating content from styling and tableless design.
If you use DW for coding, you can use your css file for CMSMS (copy --> paste). Templates from DW are not usefull for CMSMS, check a CMSMS template – there are good explanations.
A very usefull tool for developing websites is FIREBUG http://www.getfirebug.com/, you can install it in a mozilla browser.

neophron

if you set up a web site in a cms, you won't use dreamweaver for editing pages (content) and such (dreamweaver templates, editable regions, uploading pages, etc); you'd mainly be using dreamweaver to create the design and code which becomes the template in cmsms.

i create a couple of local html pages with actual site content, actual menus (the code as output by cmsms menu templates), etc.. and work from those. once you've got a design and code done in dreamweaver, it's a breeze to make it into a cmsms template.

once you've got a design and code done in dreamweaver, it's a breeze to make it into a cmsms template.

Is there a FAQ or something that explains how to do this?

If you want to just design it in DW then use it as a template in cmsms, get html from DW paste it into new template, put place holders/tags {menu}, {content} etc, where the menu, content etc. go...

Copy paste the CSS into a new style sheet in cmsms, then attach it to your new template, you may have to change some of the menu css to fit the calls Menu Manager makes for the li and a links...

Thanks, is there a page that goes into a little more detail?

Maybe here?...

http://wiki.cmsmadesimple.org/index.php ... d/Designer

Impressive justineoaker, thanks for sharing.

So back to the topic.

Lets say I have an existing dreamweaver site, and all I want to do is let the site owner edit the content in the main body of the page using the CMSMS wysiwg editor.  I want to leave the pages in dreamweaver so I can update the menu, the masthead, everything else, by changing the template.

Is there a way to open an existing html page in the cmsms interface, change certain parts, then save again?  This would be really sweet.

AuctionHugh wrote: Is there a way to open an existing html page in the cmsms interface, change certain parts, then save again?  This would be really sweet.

No, not as far as I know.  That's not what CMSms is designed to do.

AuctionHugh wrote: Lets say I have an existing dreamweaver site, and all I want to do is let the site owner edit the content in the main body of the page using the CMSMS wysiwg editor.  I want to leave the pages in dreamweaver so I can update the menu, the masthead, everything else, by changing the template.

Do the reverse.  Convert your DW site to CMSms, and then you can let the site owner update the content as you wish, and you can still update the menu, header, etc, by editing the template either within CMSms or via the TemplateExternalizer module, which lets you use any WYSIWYG or text editor to make your changes.

Hello ActionHugh,

I also was and still am a Dreamweaver user, though I now do all of my sites with CMS Made Simple (CMSMS).  Nowdays I just use Dreamweaver more for its file editing and FTP functions and don't use the WYSIWYG at all.

CMSMS has two elements that I find correlate with Dreamweaver's Library and Templates.

The CMSMS Template works like a Dreamweaver Template and lets you have many pages with one Template that you change once and it changes all the pages.

I use Global Content Blocks to replace the Dreamweaver Library.  So if there is, for example, one element that is common to several or all of my templates, I just create a Global Content Block and put the code in there, and then put {global_content name="foo"} in the templates that have this element.

Now, if I need to change the global content block, I can do it one place and all pages change instantly.

Here is where Dreamweaver still comes in handy for me.  CMSMS does not have a versioning system yet, and I have on occasion accidentally changed an element that I didn't mean to ( like when I accidentally paste a stylesheet into the template form).  So I use Dreamweaver to keep a backup of all my templates, stylesheets, menu items and global content blocks.

I just create a folder called Theme and then put subfolders in there for all of the various template elements.  When I need to change something I edit the code in Dreamweaver and then paste it into CMSMS.

Maybe someday CMSMS will have a code editor plugin for the backend and versioning, but until that day comes, I will still use Dreamweaver or a similar tool to edit my code and keep a backup copy.

ActionHugh, you will also find that with CMSMS you can give ownership of certain pages and/or global content blocks to other users by highlighting their name in the options tab.  This means you can have some global content blocks that only admins or designers can change, and some that the user can edit.

This is handy because you might have, say a mission statement, that is displayed several places on the site, that you want to let the user edit.  But you don't want the user to edit the footer or other GCB's.

Same with pages.  I have found that if you let users edit any page, they invariably put news on the news page, destroying your template, instead of using the news module.  So I make sure they don't have permission to edit the news page, and they don't even know it exists.

kendo451 wrote: Here is where Dreamweaver still comes in handy for me.  CMSMS does not have a versioning system yet, and I have on occasion accidentally changed an element that I didn't mean to ( like when I accidentally paste a stylesheet into the template form).  So I use Dreamweaver to keep a backup of all my templates, stylesheets, menu items and global content blocks.

@kendo - have you checked out the Archiver module?

It's saved my hide a couple of times.  It may not do everything you're looking for, but I've found it pretty useful.

FWIW one could, with js know how, write an extension for DW... take the template externalizer mod, merge it with the previous version that outputted pages and with that you could have a CMSMS mod and extension for DW that could still build a live view in DWcs4... you'd want to take a look at the smarty extension for DW for ideas on how to process the two..you'd have to use your site manager or the extension wouldn't know where to pull scripts from.

This is totally doable.. one just need time to do it about 80h I'd guess for the first version... but it'd be sweet... Cheers -J

I am new here and hope that this isn't considered thread hijacking but since this is very close to my exact question, I thought it might be okay to ask here. If not, I apologize and will move the question.

Start of by saying I am just a sales guy with some tech background. I work for a small website design company and we are getting more and more requests (becuase of the economy) for some aspect of self maintenance and are looking for software that our clients don't have to buy and install (like contribute).

The team here uses DW (in code view, no WYSIWYG for them, they can hand code if needed), are pretty sold on it, and are up to speed on CSS, etc.

I see from the posts above the various ways to work between the two programs but my question is this. What is the learning curve for CMSMS for a code jockey as well as a completely technologically illiterate client?

Also, Is it possible to set things up in CMSMS so that the client is only able to alter/update selected text and images?

Thanks in advance, Sorry if this is in the wrong place.

You might as well have the thread because the answer to my question is that there is no way to maintain most of a site with dreamweaver while having the content maintained by the user using CMSMS, from what I can tell.  You can start in dreamweaver but then you have to switch entirely to CMSMS at some point.

I personally think a dreamweaver extension would be very valuable and even something that could be sold.  I know I purchased something similar for a client for $150, and it worked great, but the company no longer supports it.  But we can maintain the site with dreamweaver, DW templates, etc, and any areas we mark as editable can be edited in the products' CMS wysiwyg interface.  It was a great product and it is a shame they are no longer selling or supporting it.  It was here: http://www.interspire.com/content/categories/WebEdit/