I hope I'm posting in the right area. Forgive me if I'm not, but I did look at the others and thought this was the most applicable.
Anyways, I've been making blog/article/editorial commentary websites for a couple years now, and I do them all using just pure HTML. I'm particularly partial to the header/left column menu/middle column main/right column extras/footer model. So I'll make an article as an HTML page, then code my own "Related links" by hand on the right side, and change those linked pages to also link to the new page I just created, and so on each time. It becomes cumbersome and I'm hoping to learn and implement a CMS into this role.
I've created a new template that I want to use, and I've already installed CMS Made Simply on my server. I've made an example template and, before I start trying to make a CSS template for CMS MS, I am wondering if CMS MS will allow me to do some of these things.
The link above is my example of how my sites I do now currently function. Will there be a way in CMS MS that I can have a list of Related Stories/Articles (whatever I call it) automatically appear when I post a new story/article? And will there (or does there also exist) Tags (or keywords or something similar) that I can utilize?
For example, I really like the CNN Political Ticker layout, where you've got new content being added in a main section. Each new addition to the Ticker has a "Filed under: (Tags listed here)" feature, as well as a Comments feature (my example uses JS-Kit, but they aren't XHTML-compliant and are a bit of a pain anyway). And you can click the particular article stub to read the complete article.
Then, on the right hand side, you've got a bunch of extra boxes used for various features. I'm mostly interested in the Categories box ( presumably using the Tags from the "Filed Under") and the Related Links - although I notice that the Related Links are just random on CNN and I'd hope to be able to have similar stories to the topic being discussed automatically generate similar links (rather than manually doing so like I've been doing thus far).
Is there an extension or module or something similar for CMS MS that will help me accomplish this (essentially the CNN functionality of the specific components I described above but within the layout and styles also linked above)? If so, where can I grab it?
Thanks again everyone
