CMS Made Simple Forums

Hello, this is my first post on the forum. I am not sure I am posting in the right place, but here seemed the most logical - to me! I am also conscious that I have much to learn, so please forgive any misunderstandings on my part etc.

I have been involved in website design/development for about 2 years. I have designed and built a couple of websites in a tool called Serif WebPlus which is a bit like DTP for websites. It is easy to learn and very flexible. I have also been involved in the development of my (UK) employers website for which I use Dreamweaver. We had a graphic designer design and provide HTML templates we were happy with and then I took the templates and built all of the pages. That was 18 months ago and over that time our website has expanded from about 80 to nearly 300 pages.

For my employers' website we have just signed off a new design from our designer who is providing a fresh set of templates for us to use. The task we now have is to migrate the content of nearly 300 pages into the new templates. My guesstimate is that this will take about 30 minutes per page meaning around 150 hours of work - not a small task!

As I see it, for this iteration of our website design, there is no shortcut to moving the content from our old to the new design. All of the content is held staticallly in the HTML pages and even if we were to adopt a CMS system approach now, we would still need to get the existing content into the CMS.

However, for the next iteration of the design of our website in, say, 2 years, if we are still using static HTML pages, the migration could well exceed 250 hours and the pain for each migration gets even greater. As I understand it though, whilst the time taken to migrate to the new design now would not be any easier if going the CMS route, once done, for future migrations the task would be much easier.

Anyway, that's a preamble to put you in the picture of where I am at in all of this.

My questions are:

1. How flexible is CMS Made Simple for using regular HTML templates (as I said we currently use Dreamweaver)? Our graphic designer has built the new templates using HTML tables and so we have pre-defined regions that could be tagged with which content goes where. Can CMSMS utilise these templates (or any other we may have in the future) providing the content regions are clearly defined? Or does CMSMS impose constraints on where content regions can be defined?

2. Is there a function within CMSMS to take the content regions of our existing website by copying the WYSIWYG text (i.e. with HTML tags embedded) and pasting into CMSMS?

Thanks in advance for any help you can give me on this.

Anastasis wrote: 1. How flexible is CMS Made Simple for using regular HTML templates (as I said we currently use Dreamweaver)?

It's very simple. CMSms uses HTML templates pure. You have only to change content region to {content} or menu region to {menu} (with adaption of your menu). On a site visit content and menu will now replaced with content and menu created by CMSms.

2. Is there a function within CMSMS to take the content regions of our existing website by copying the WYSIWYG text (i.e. with HTML tags embedded) and pasting into CMSMS?

Does not exist, but it would be a nice feature.

2. Is there a function within CMSMS to take the content regions of our existing website by copying the WYSIWYG text (i.e. with HTML tags embedded) and pasting into CMSMS?

Actually it should work if you copy paste text from your content area to wysiwyg, but as I dont trust wysiwygs I would take the html source and paste that without wysiwyg (it will take a minute or two longer but its better to have cleaner html)

Also you might want to revise your html code at the same time, if you use inline styles move them to a stylesheet and so on, it will greatly reduce the time to change the layout later. I myself try to design pages so that I can change a layout by simply dropping in a new template (15mins) and css (5mins) and taking that template to use (with testing 30mins)

Hope this helps

Apologies for the delay in my replying. Thank you for the very helpful info. This seems like a very friendly forum which makes a nice change from so many on the internet.

I have installed a copy of CMSMS on my personal website and initially impressed by the ease of use. I will no doubt have a lot more questions, but thanks for your help so far.