CMS Made Simple templates..How?

techguy

Hi There,

Has anybody here made custome templates/themes for CMS Made Simple ?

I've been trawling Google for a while now and haven't really come up with any decent guides.

I've found base templates on the CMSMS site but I don't really understand them.

It seems that these themes are single xml files and I don't see any html or css in them..

I have made templates for CubeCart before and its not too bad. It looks like CMSMS is using a different approach that i'm not familiar with.

Evil Phil

More of a design question techguy, so I'll move it over there. Reckon you'll get a better response there too

S.M.B.

The last version of CMS Made Simple I've used was version 1.4 and it used a standard templating system which was very easy to edit.

They're now up to version 1.6 so maybe there has been drastic changes in the last year but I doubt it.

daymobrew

techguy wrote: »

It seems that these themes are single xml files and I don't see any html or css in them.

The xml files are not the templates but rather a way to distribute templates.

The Templates documentation is a good starting point.
I generally create a basic html template and get it working outside of CMSMS. Then I copy it into CMSMS and change the content area to {content} and then the stylesheet links to {stylesheet}. Do it incrementally to make sure nothing broke. I find the menu stuff the most difficult.

S.M.B.

Also, could someone explain to me the difference between the Design and Development forums?

Seems to me to be very little logic behind it.

techguy

Thanks Damo,

I don't know how I missed that link. It seems to be exactly what I was looking for.

@SMB: The way I see it is the Design forum is for visual design i.e. how things look,colours etc.. Then the Development forum is for the behind the scenes programming etc..

tommycahir

Hi techguy

Have a look at the following CBT session convert OSWD template to cmsms template

It basically shows you how to convert a HTML template to a cmsms template