Book Image

CMS Made Simple 1.6: Beginner's Guide

Book Image

CMS Made Simple 1.6: Beginner's Guide

Overview of this book

CMS Made Simple is a an open source content management system that allows rapid website development in a fraction of the normal time, avoiding hours of coding by providing modules and 3rd Party add-ons. With this book in hand you will be able to harness the power of this modular and extendable content management system at your fingertips.This guide for CMS Made Simple is based on practical and working solutions allowing you to understand how this powerful and simple application can support you in your daily work. The workshop helps you create engaging, effective, and easy-to-use CMS websites for businesses, clubs, or organizations.This is a step- by-step case study, aimed at helping you build a complete professional website with CMS Made Simple. You can take a ready-to-use template or implement your own custom design, enrich the website with features like a photo gallery, an e-commerce solution with PayPal checkout, and forms of any complexity or popular JQuery effects and finish it off by optimizing it for search engines. The useful HTML and CSS code snippets are optimized and can be easily adapted for your own projects. Chapter by chapter you will put yourself in the role of web designer, developer, administrator, and business manager, thus learning every aspect needed for building rich websites that are very simple to manage.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
CMS Made Simple 1.6
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface

Case study website


In this book, we will work on a case study website that will be completed at the end of Chapter 8, Creating Your Own Functionality, and can be filled with content and published at this point. Imagine that you have to create a business website for the company businessWorld from scratch. businessWorld is a company that needs a website based on a CMS, as the content of the website will be managed by the staff of the company. Our task is to create a basic website structure, implement the custom layout delivered in HTML and CSS, and provide the functionalities that the company describes in the functional specifications.

Functional specifications

The total number of pages is not mentioned. The staff will add any required pages in the course of time. The new pages should automatically be added to the navigation of the website. The layout will be delivered as an HTML or CSS template and must be ported to CMS Made Simple.

Besides the ordinary content pages, the website should also include the following:

  • A news section, where news articles are created, categorized, and published to the website at the given date

  • A search function for content pages and news articles

  • A printing ability as PDF for all pages

  • A FAQ section that can be consequently extended with new questions and answers

  • A photo gallery, where products images and photos of the team members can be organized in albums

  • A product catalog with custom fields and product hierarchy

  • A contact form to avoid direct e-mail communication and reduce spam

  • A newsletter with self-subscription by the website visitor

  • A service desk for registered customers

Different editor permissions are required for each section of the website. There will be some staff members who are allowed to manage only news articles. Others will be responsible for the products catalog, but will not have access to the news area, and so on. The website should be optimized for search engines. During the lifetime of the website, the webmaster is required to regularly update the website if new releases of the modules or of core CMS Made Simple are published. Now that we know the specifications, let's move on to preparing our system for installation.