diagnosis needed: is CMSMS right for this site?

[npessoa]

Hi, all:

I'm glad to have found this forum, after several days of researching different CMSs. Being way more familiar with the design end of things than coding, I have completed a handful of sites that are becoming cumbersome to update by hand, and I'd like to offer the clients a more user-friendly way to update their event lists, news, etc. In the past, I've had to rely on php-includes and flat files, and I'd like to (finally!) move in the direction of MySQL so I can have more efficient control over the content.

My question is about layout and design, because I'm not sure how flexible CMSMS is in terms of customizing the templates. The site I'm looking to crossover is one I did for a musician. It's designed in such a way that almost mimics the look/feel of "blocks," so I'm thinking it would work... but can you tell me if this sort of site would be possible in CMSMS?

http://www.harpjas.com/main.php

I realize some redesign will be necessary, but if possible, I'd like to stay as close to the current design as possible, and just organize the back-end so it's easier to update all of the content in one place. Any advice is greatly appreciated. Thank you!

[tsw]

As long as your layout is xhtml / css and semantic dont worry about layout it will be quite easy to convert that site to cmsms

hope this helps

[Dr.CSS]

That site looks like an excellent candidate for CMSMS, I've used simplviewer gallery on this page http://www.multiintech.com/index.php?pa ... mpleviewer

If you need any help with converting to CMSMS (the BEST cms ever imho  ) just ask...

[npessoa]

Ok, good to know! As long as I can keep the same look and avoid the ultra-templatey and boxy appearance of so many CMS-templates, it seems like it will be worth it to switch over. Now is a good time, too, because after next week I will have the time to dedicate to figuring out the new system.

Incidentally, Mark - when you used simpleviewer, were you able to upload new pictures directly via CMSMS?

Also, does anyone know if CMSMS has an event-list add-on? That's one of the things I need the most, so I can make a list of concert dates and have them be archived once the date has passed. I was using Cutenews for the news on http://www.harpjas.com/main.php and wasn't able to get two categories to work on the same page, so I had to resort to hand scripting for the events list, and it's a big pain to keep current.

So basically I need a module or something in non-graphical format that will use a cron job and only keep future events at the top. Is this poassible?

Thanks, guys!

[tsw]

So basically I need a module or something in non-graphical format that will use a cron job and only keep future events at the top. Is this poassible?

Sounds like news or calendar module should work in your situation

[Dr.CSS]

tsw is right News or Calendar for events is a good choice as you will be able to call both of them more than once on a page with diff. views/arrangements of info...

I had to use the simplviewer interface to build it then embed it in the template...