Photoshop Theme Creation

[joecanti]

Hi all,

For a while i created websites in Photoshop and dreamweaver - great designing potential but no CMS! Then I started using CMS made simple - a truly great system for content management and i have created a few projects by just messing around with templates/themes. My coding skills leave a lot to be desired, so most of this has been just trial and error to create sites like: http://www.visionforsidmouth.org .

What I would like to do now is combine these two areas, so I am after some help in creating CMSMS themes from photoshop documents. I have read several tutorials here but cannot quite get my head around it.

Lets say I have in front of me my designed template in Photoshop. It is sliced up and ready to be exported to html. I have the area for content in one slice, the menu area in another slice, the footer in another slice etc etc. I then export this as html and open it up in dreamweaver.

How do I add the tags so that CMSMS knows where to put the content/menus etc?

How can I create content boxes that stretch vertically to accommodate content?

How can I add more than one content area, and how is this managed in CMSMS?

And finally, is there anything else I should watch out for when creating themes in this way?

Many thanks for your help - if I can get this side of the designing sorted it will revolutionize the way i work. Please forgive my lack of code understanding - we had a bad teacher at uni and I have a mental block for code now!

Thanks again, All the best, Joe

[jmcgin51]

Joe,

You may want to start here:
http://wiki.cmsmadesimple.org/index.php ... d/Designer

This discusses converting existing templates to CMSMS, etc.

[Nullig]

And here:

http://cmsmadesimple.org/uploads/media/ ... colate.htm

Nullig

[joecanti]

Thanks very much for your reply - I will study those links tomorrow and see what I can make of them...

Will post back when I have had a look....

Thanks again, Joe