CMS Made Simple Forums

I'm currently uploading CMSMS to my server.  It looks like it's the closest thing to what I need right now.  I'd been running Wordpress on my site, but I wanted to get away from the blog setup.  I basically want a static website with the content dynamic in basically only one div (see pic below).  Will I be able to plug in my css and index pages and set the articles/posts to the single div?  The content will stay the same for every page except for the one section--like a newspaper website.  The only exception is that on the front page, I'll have a javascript image slide show providing links to different articles.  Does anyone have any advice on the quickest or smoothest way to get this done?  Again, the cms hasn't fully finished uploading, but I'd like to be ahead of the game anyway.  Thanks.

Hi Austin,

This seems like a very basic and workable layout for the CMS.

You can have a template what includes all the suggested items. You could make the header picture fixed, bannerlike rotating or different for each page you build. The search is a standard module included with your CMS. The article/changing content is where you want to put your {content} tag. In that content tag you can also embed flash or javascript for the slideshow. You can also include headers to newsitems and so on.

The Poll is also a module you could use from the CMS. I've never used it, but most modules work like a charm. Off course you can also embed an external poll in your template.
If the youtube video is fixed, then you can put it in the template. If it is a changing thing you could build that into a news item or as a second content block to change it per page.

The links to pages within the site can be done by placing the menu tags from the CMS there.

Info can be put in a global content block or template.

Most of this is explained in the basic how-to's. If it is documented you can view it here. Just install the CMS with sample content and watch how those look as well.

On how to make sure everything is completely alligned correctly, that's just hoping you have some skills with CSS and HTML. CMSMS doens't add much difficulty to that.

Good luck

Thanks for the reply, Mantlet; it was very helpful.  I'll have a good amount of time to learn the cmsms setup tonight, and I already have my template/css made, so I guess it shouldn't give me too much trouble.  Thanks again.