CMS Made Simple Forums

Hi everyone. 

Just wanted to introduce myself and also ask for opinion.  My name is David and I've been working in "web" for 6 years now, but its only been the last year I've been able to get involved with a bit of php and things like that.  So still very much learning.

CMS Made Simple looks as though it is a very very system to get to grips with, compared to others I've seen.

I hope to use the CMS soon for a website already up called www.chinese-in-china.com.

Inital feelings are that this website will go nicely into CMSMS, but not 100% sure of how I would get the website to work differently.  I want to lose the whole blog type homepage.  Any ideas as to what the solution of this could be?

I look forward to hearing your views, and also hope to be a  long and prosperous addition to the community!

Thanks,

Hi and welcome,

CMS Made Simple isn't a blog type solution but a full blown CMS system with strong goal to be very customizable.

You can do almost anything from company website to small homepage with it.

A quick peek to the site mentioned tells me that cmsms is just right for it, you might want to look at FAQ and FromBuilder modules for some extra functionality.

As cmsms is template driven you can modify all aspects as you wish (well menu templates are quite hard to modify, but the default templates work nicely for 99% situations with some css styling)

Hope this clarifies things, and please do ask if you have any other questions.

ps. if you want to give something back to the community while learning please take a look at the wiki, you can login with your forum username and password and maybe add some info about things you have learned and which are not yet documented

Looks like it will be a perfect site for CMSMS, the look can be changed to whatever you like...

Sample of templates ported work in CMSMS...

http://multiintech.com/

I'm glad the replies so far suggest I am on the correct route.  I was looking at Drupal, but the learning curve on that was so steep, and I think it was a bit overkill for what I needed to do.

Thanks for the hints for FAQ's and the FormBuilder.  I'll bear that in mind.  I also saw a newsletter module.  This potentially be very helpful for future. 

I'm pretty confident that I can pull off most of the website, but I'm a little unsure as to how I can put the homepage into the CMS properly.  Obviously I dont want to ask on how to do things to the very word, but any suggestions would be great.

I'll attempt to contribute the wiki, if I think something is useful.  Infact, just changed a typo!

Thanks,
D

Take the HTML and copy/paste it into a new template, strip out the content and menu, add menu tag {menu} and content tag {content} in place of them, the news is a tag {news}, if you need more content boxes add more content tags {content block="content2"} {content block="content3"} etc., copy/paste CSS into new style sheets attach them to template...

This of course is the quick lesson version, to learn more go to documentation at top of this page...

I've had a play around, and I'm jumping with excitment, as to how easy this is going to be (sad I know).

One last question, before I get underway though.  As my website is currently up at Chinese-in-china.com, my installation of CMSMS will end up at wwwchinese-in-china.com/cmsms or similar.  Whats the best way to get the CMS version of the site to come up as the default.  As Im relatively new to this malarky I'm not 100%, but someone told me I could use a .htaccess file and add an alias.

What's the best way?  I'm sure someone must have overcome this problem already!

D

you can use .htaccess or just move the site down from the extra folder when its ready.

steps to move the site to a different folder:

1. clear cache
2. move files (make sure you move all files)
3. edit config.php to reflect these changes
4. clear cache again just to be sure

thats it.

hope this helps

OK, got it installed, eventually...  But now I've stopped jumping around so much.

I've got the template pretty much there for normal content pages.

The sticking point I'm having is for "landing" pages, such as this one: http://www.chinese-in-china.com/centres/ were a short synopsis  of the page is given first.  Ideally, I think the best way would be to get all children of a page, print out headers and a few lines of copy, and a picture if possible.

As I am a php newbie, and a Smarty dunce, I am a bit stuck.  Can anyone help out, either by hand holding, or by throwing me into the deep end of some smarty exercises?

Thanks in advance!

That would be a good use of the News module, the short description is summary and the full detail is content, summary comes with a [More] link that can be changed to Read More...

that's certainly one option.  only trouble is the editor is nearly as stupid as me.  If I were to attempt it the parent > child way... could you point me in the right direction ?

Sorry for asking so much of everyone - but i'm on a hell of a learning curve.

Also, I cant seem to find details about the menu manager....  apart from this old post: http://forum.cmsmadesimple.org/index.ph ... 682.0.html

It mentions a word document with this in - any ideas?  I'd like this sort of thing, and details of parameters that can be assigned to stuff...

The post about the Menu Manger and Help meant for you to go to Extensions » Modules there you see the names of the Modules, in newer ver. of CMSMS you can click the name of the Module, to the right is the 'word' Help click the 'word' help and it opens the Help file with parameters for the module... 

the Help (word) on the right etc. etc.

I meant the word Help...

As in News...

(optional) moretext="more..." - Text to display at the end of a news item if it goes over the summary length. Defaults to "more..."

old style...
{cms_module module="news" moretext="Read More..."}

New style...

{news moretext="Read More..."}

BTW. have you looked at the Handbook... http://wiki.cmsmadesimple.org/index.php/User_Handbook