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.
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.