Noob looking for direction :)

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Hi everyone,
I'm new to this community and just finished my Concrete5 sandbox instillation on my local machine. I am in the process of translating my current website from a CMS that I was personally creating to Concrete5, but I'm not entirely sure where to begin. Me being an avid user of Dreamweaver, I'm trying to find out what I need to know to start modifying the current HTML of my website, to integrate with Concrete5. Should I use the editor in Concrete5 to markup my site first and then I think create a theme of each page as they are modified or what?

I'm not sure if the heart of everything is themes or what not, but I could use a little direction. My site is PHP oriented already. If you wish, you can check out my site as it is now athttp://www.keyjaycompound.com .

Lastly, there's a feature on my current site that I'm wondering how would be implemented using this system. I have a most current article ticker on the front page and when the article is new than 10 days, it's styled differently else it's styled another way. Would this be difficult to maintain? Another thing my site does is that I can change the header ticker from my CMS which changes and writes to an XML file somewhere else. Again, would my code be easily transferable or would creating such options to modify within the back end be difficult? Or is there another practical way I should be thinking of implementing these features?
Thanks for your help guys and looking forward to some help!

 
jvansanten replied on at Permalink Reply
Since you've built your own CMS, the moves that C5 makes will be familiar conceptually.

The reason that I chose C5 for the company standard CMS is that it is a CMS out of the box, but also has solidity and consistency like a framework dedicated to web development. So, before actually developing my first website in C5, I spent quite a bit of time just "playing" in the sandbox -- using the interactive level aspects until they became second nature. This does a couple things -- it allows getting an immediate return on your investment of time, and it helps understand the depth of the interactive level -- and how that hands off to the specifics of your site.

Next step is integrating with your workflow. For Adobe tools, I use FW rather than DW, as it provides a clean mapping to the HTML/CSS that C5 celebrates. I've seen some partial mappings between DW and C5 -- for menus and snippets.

But, C5 lives in the world of HTML/CSS/JS and if your workflow maps to that cleanly, you'll have less problem than trying to debug unique problems.

Following that route, the first step would be to create a new theme. There are several available, one on this site, one done by Remo -- which I particularly like for the absolute basics. Once you get that working, both what can be done through the interactive interface and what is left to do become apparent.

As for CSS, many of the C5 themes are based on absolute positioning. I don't find them that flexible for development. I've adopted the 960 theme (there's a free download in the Add-Ons to get you started, but you'll want to visit the main 960 site for the extraordinarily succinct but complete documentation -- the demo pages). Folks don't realize that this doesn't have to look boxy, you can use floats inside the various columns and it is very flexible.

Pages are very flexible and you can create your own specific types.

That should take care of the visual look and feel. Then you've got some changeable items. Check in the Add-Ons to see if you can find a block to address those issues. A simple change in style -- which can be applied at multiple levels for a block -- which address the different appearance.

HTH
Steevb replied on at Permalink Reply
Steevb
Hello and welcome,

All my sites are hand built using Dreamweaver mostly and sometimes Coda.

There are a few basic steps and files needed

Take a look at this page and video:

http://www.concrete5.org/documentation/how-tos/designers/make-a-the...


Hope that helps

Steev