CMS Made Simple Forums

Hello, my site www.cinegeek.com will be adding some new writers and I need the site to update quicker and I need the writers to be able to post their own articles without me having to author each one individually.  I was recommended to use a CMS.  Problem is that I have no experience coding.  CineGeek is created entirely in MS Frontpage.  Can I author these pages in Frontpage and still have the CMS work properly.  If not, how do I get banners and so forth onto the pages.  I've added images through the image manager but I can't figure out what to do next.  Thanks in advance for and help you guys can provide....

I'd suggest looking here first:
http://www.cmsmadesimple.org/how_cmsms_works.shtml

But basically take the "html  code" that frontpage has... and insert the a place holder tag called "{content}" where you want the text of your pages to be. Take that html code, and go to the "templates" section of the admin section. And create a new template, paste it in there.  (if you have styles, put that there also.). Save it.

The go create a "page" and assign it that template. The text you type there will go into the "content" area you put in your HTML. kinda make sense?

I think the Frontpage code is making the template setup go crazy.  Nothing is working right.  I'm going to have to dig in here and figure out how to customize this site.  How do you add banners across the top with logos and such.  Do I have to actually edit the html there as well?  I have already imported the image I just can't find where to add it to the main page.

In a nutshell, Frontpage as a tool is inappropriate for this purpose.

How so? Frontpage relies on a feature called "tables" for its layout capabilities. This CMS is using CSS and web designers in general are moving toward using CSS instead of tables.

Really, what you ideally would want to do is to take your existing text and images, and remove old things like FONT tags. You will define those in custom CSS stylesheet instead.

I've looked at your site, and it is sprinkled with CSS code all over its table design elements.

The fastest way to convert it to pure CSS is to use a tool such as Topstyle Pro 3.11 (it has a neat feature that upgrades old HTML code to CSS-optimized code), but that may not even be necessary. You generally want to make the overall layout as standard as possible and use a global stylesheet to manage everything.

The default template in current code is still a little difficult to use. I should know, I spent a week getting things to work for me and finally gave up and created another template that works like a dream. We are working on documenting the default template code and making it easier for people not familiar with CSS to use as well as more forgiving. I use a custom template on my site, and it will happily consume any existing content. I am in the process of integrating that code with the default template to hopefully make something that would be ready to use out of the box since as it is currently, it doesn't look like the default template works correctly when bad code is thrown at it.

If you want it, I can certainly provide you with the code, but it's not pretty yet.