CMS Made Simple Forums

im an absolute beginner and am having problems getting my head around the ideas of how a this cms works....

i have an existing website, valid css and xhtml. i want to start using this cms for content and other things such as event calender etc. to test ive set this up on my local system using xampp. so ive got it installed and ive been reading throuh the documentation but im a bit lost. my existing website is located at http://localhost/mysite  and ive placed cmsms in the same directory. is this right? how do i start making my site dynamic? i know on the cmsms main page ot says o question is to stupid to ask but i really do feel like a bit of a dope  . i tried creating a new template using the code from my main page and imported the css but i cant figure it out. on my main page the pathe to my css file is css/master.css but this path isnt valid when i upload the page. where should everything go? images etc?

hi, thanks for trying cmsms.

Maybe you should first install a test environment and play around with default templates a bit, create new pages in content -> pages and see what happens.

After you get comfortable with editing / adding / deleting pages you can convert your existing layout to cmsms, its pretty simple if your current site is done with valid xhtml and styled with css.

first copy paste html from one page of your current site to new cmsms template, remove all content you want to be dynamic (like content and menu) and replace those with cmsms tags like {content} and {menu}. You might want to look at the default templates for examples on using those tags and others (like {stylesheet} and {metadata})

then copy paste your css to a new css stylesheet in cmsms and assign that stylesheet to your template.

then you can start transferring content from your old site.

hope this helps.