CMS Made Simple Forums

Hi and welcome.

Is there a way to have it the same layout and design of the existing website?

Yes of course, that's one of the key advantages of CMS Made Simple.

During install you (could have) installed the sample content. Then you're website will have a lot of pages installed. Those pages contain a lot of useful information about how things work in CMSMS.

http://docs.cmsmadesimple.org/layout/co ... e-to-cmsms contains useful information too. Just try to understand how things work in CMSMS and you will see how flexible it is.

Note that in CMSMS templates and stylesheets are edited from the back-end (admin). So no need to edit files. Images etc. need to be uploaded to the webserver.

Menu Manager has templates to build a menu as you want it to. You can choose from the sample templates or build your own.

Don't hesitate to ask for help (after reading the mentioned info).

The installed sample page templates contain comments too.

also is it possible to just have the admin side inside the cms folder rather than the whole cms in the cms folder?

Sure, just don't install in the '/cms' folder but move everything to the webroot.

Further, remove the /install directory after succesful installation. It's better for security.