CMS Made Simple Overview

CMS Made Simple (CMSMS) currently offers one of the nicest balances between ease of use and capability of any CMS on the market. Like all CMS applications however, it can still take new users a while to “get their head around it’. With any luck spending just a few minutes reading this overview will shorten your learning curve.

The Database Rules

The essence of CMS Made Simple is that nearly all information is stored in a linked database. So this is the first thing – don’t bother looking for the ‘contact us’ page in the hosting account’s file directory structure because you won’t find it! To repeat – all information that defines the structure of a page (called a template), the appearance of the page (a stylesheet) and the actual content that a site visitor reads or views is stored in the database, not in files. There are certainly a great many files in a CMS, but they are associated with the CMS application – they do not contain content.

An important implication is that if you backup up your file structure without also backing up the database then in effect you have backed up nothing (of importance). The file structure can usually be readily re-instated. Without a backup of the database, the content cannot.

If there are no content files, what is a viewable page ?

Actually there is one main file: index.php. In fact in the normal situation this is the only file directly associated with displaying content. Pages are formed for display by fetching information from the database and ‘pouring’ it into index.php. The result could be index.php?page=about-us. What this is saying is that the content that was created for the ‘about us’ page is to be displayed in the structure defined by index.php. In this way index.php can be thought of as a shell. The implied separation between content and structure is not accidental either. In fact in a CMS it is a fundamental, so let’s explore this aspect a little further.

Page Structure

As part of the design process a template is created that, loosely speaking, determines what elements are to be displayed on any page that is instructed to use that particular template. For example a typical template could include the following elements:

- header
- top menu area
- sidebar area
- main content area
- footer

The appearance of any content added to these elements is controlled by a stylesheet that is linked to the template. For example the stylesheet could dictate that text added to the sidebar would be 10px in size, use the Arial font style, be black in colour and have a blue background. The same stylesheet could dictate that the main content area  would set the text size to 12px, font to Georgia, colour to black and have a white background.

Typically a CMS Made Simple website will have multiple templates available for different purposes that are each linked to multiple stylesheets.

Creating a page includes three main steps:

• naming it (so that the menu knows what it is and where it sits in relation to other pages)
• assigning a template (the linked stylesheet comes along for the ride automatically)
• and finally adding the content

Content

The term ‘content’ describes that part of the page that a visitor reads or views that makes up the article or purpose of the page. Content may be comprised of text, images, videos, music, tables or forms.

Content is what website owners are typically called upon to create. For a small business this may include pages associated with their products or services supported by additional pages for administrative and contact information.

The menu structure or sitemap

The final part of the mix is to set the relationship between the pages. This is done when each page is created by simply setting (via a pull down list) where a page is to sit in relation to any existing pages. e.g an existing menu structure may look like this:

• Home
• Products
  • Product A
• Informaton
• About Us

If a new page for a new product (Product B) was to be added the new page would be assign ‘Products’ as its ‘parent’. After saving the page the menu structure would automatically update to look like this:

• Home
• Products
  • Product A
  • Product B
• Informaton
• About Us

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