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

Chapter 4. Design and Layout

In this chapter, we will learn what templates are. The strength of CMS Made Simple is its flexibility of design. Once you have understood how you can combine your static HTML with the dynamic parts of the website and format them with CSS, you will never lose control of your design or layout in CMS.

In this chapter, we will:

  • Work with existing templates

  • Create our own template from scratch

  • Add and organize stylesheets

  • Create and format navigation

  • Port HTML templates to CMS Made Simple

  • Learn the basics of Smarty

  • Learn about exporting templates

CMS Made Simple uses various templates to display the content of your website. To understand templates, think of them as predefined layouts. Every time you create a new page, you choose a layout to define how this page should look.

You can easily imagine a template as a wrapper for your content. The wrapper (layout) is always the same; the content changes from page-to-page. The editor of the website just adds content to the page and...