Hi

I really need to learn CMS ive looked at a number of courses but they are not the best for times so thought I would self learn.

The easier the better what I am looking to learn is just CMS I know there a lot of CMS systems out there but I want to be able to put them in you my websites and not have a tottally different look and feel.

I dont know where to start or if there is software out there which can help me do this.

Any help would be great, thanks.

Hiya Karl,

To know better how to answer that, we'd need to know exactly what you mean by "not having a totally different look and feel". Different than what? I guess that's my question.

Have you checked out Joomla? It's definitely one of the best ones out there and the easiest to learn how to use as well as Wordpress which is also extremely popular. Both of these would give you everything a CMS could possibly give and aren't too difficult to learn.

More information on what you are expecting out of a CMS would probably help though.

Both of those are free, and many others are too. Artisteer is a great tool for creating new themes for them both so maybe that is something you can look into. It's not cheap, but it's worth every penny as it makes themes for a lot of different HTML, PHP, CMS etc. type sites. Worth the cost by far to get the better version of it.

Hi thanks for your reply Jo Ann I mean check out my website www.sa31.co.uk I would like to put cms in to that site is that possible.

Thanks

Well Karl, the problem is that you're wanting to put CMS "into" your existing site, whereas CMS is usually "the" site system. If you haven't looked at Joomla at http://www.joomla.org or Wordpress at http://wordpress.com, you might want to give that a once over to see what I mean. They are full website systems where you don't really add them "to" a website, they "are" the website.

There are scripts out there that you can use to utilize editing for sites that give it a type of CMS setup, something like CushyCMS http://www.cushycms.com/en comes to mind here. Mostly this helps to have people other than yourself to edit the sites.

The main question I guess would be... what about the CMS sites is it that you want to incorporate? If there's a specific thing about CMS sites that you are needing maybe it's something that can be done without CMS. Would need to know more about what it is you're actually trying to learn it for.

The main thing here though is that a CMS is a website rather than a script to add to a website. Hopefully that all made sense

There is - or at least was - a cms framework that could turn an existing traditional site into a cms. I can't find it right now, but is was a 'light' version of WysiwygPro. I mailed them a little over a year ago and asked about it. Here is my mail to them:



And the reply I got:



I can't find any download link, though...

hmm never heard of that one, but sounds a lot like the setup of CushyCMS so that's another option if it's still out there.

I use CushyCMS for a few sites I have done and find it overall an easy to implement system. It saves me changing minor things. The only down side is that, obviously, the changes are made to the files on the server, not on your computer.

So if you do want to edit a page that people have access to with Cushy, you need to remember to download that page off of your server first....

Unfortunately, I speak from experience. Rookie mistake!!!

Simon - thanks for sharing that. I had always been under the impression (at least with CushyCMS, and some of the 'better' ones) that the pages were made up of 2 separate parts. I thought there was one file for the "static" part, and a different one for the "dynamic" part, and the .html page just tied them both together. Thinking that, I would have made that same mistake that you speak of, not downloading from the server prior to updating.

The closest I've ever come to working with this type of site, was a restaurant I had helped fix a site for. The owner wanted to be able to update the "Chef's Special" each week, dependent upon what they had gotten a good deal on from their vendors. So a picture and brief description was inserted. I just took the easy route (to me it was anyway) and named the picture chefsspecial.jpg and the customer just uploaded a new picture each week (replacing the previous of the same name).

It looks as if that wysiwygEZ, which I mentioned above, has folded, at least the website is down. But another tool, which I have tried and found well working, is the Snippetmaster: http://www.snippetmaster.com/index.php .

It does not turn your site into a cms, but you can make various parts of the pages editable for people who log in through an admin panel.

Thank you everyone for your help, I've just fallen in love with CushyCMS the price is a bit steep but it does what is says on the tin and really easy to use.

Thanks Again