Dreamweaver and CMS

[DS8108]

What tools can I provide a customer for editing his/her website (CMS) after I design in Dreamweaver.

I have a customer that would like to maintain certain areas of their website. I looked for pricing on InContext editing and it appears to not be available any longer. So how can I set this up for them?

[adninjastrator · Accepted solution]

You don't need the iframe... you need to "integrate" the look and feel of the WordPress theme into the Web design you already have... so you need to be able to customize WP to match your existing site. Here is a very good tutorial:

http://jonathanwold.com/tutorials/wordpress_theme/

That way the client edited section of the Web site looks like the rest of the site.

Adninjastrator

[martcol]

Sounds to me Donna, as though it is time for you to experiment!

I am a novice coder and if I am honest PHP is my personal Everest and after about three years, I still feel like Im tying the laces of my climbing boots!  But I have managed to build a couple of sites that I'm happy with:

pictopoetry.co.uk and I'm currently working in : martcol.co.uk/brightontherapyservice

Both those sites give full editorial control to the site owners.

Adninjastrator has given you a good link on integrating an existing site with WP and it is worth studying that.  Personally, I found that difficult when I first started with WP although I would probably find it easier now.  I think the easier approach is to ge hold of a solid, bare-bones theme and use a child-theme on that.

Wordpress has a mass of documentation which is at times overwhelming.  It has a solid user forum but it can be a bit sniffy, and i've often been ignored.  On Wordpress, I have found the Sitepoint forum better.

At the moment I am thinking about a small site for an electrician and I'm going to have a go with GetSimple CMS  http://get-simple.info/start/mission-statement/

It looks pretty straight forward.

Wordpress is both straightforward and complicated at the same time.  It has had me tied up in knots plenty of times.  But it is worth the effort.  The two things that most helped  me  were 1) using child themes and 2) understanding template hierarchy.  I also got myself a copy of Beginning Wordpress 3.0 and Smashing Wordpress: Beyond the Blog.  I think the former was most useful.

Martin

[cmspro]

Cushy CMS (http://cushycms.com/) or Konductor (http://konductor.net) work well within the Adobe workflow.

[osgood_]

Persoanlly I hate Wordpress with a passion. In my opinion its only for those that want to choose an off-the-shelf designed theme and base their site design on that theme. Pretty restrictive in my opinion. To bend Wordpress to ones own design you have to jump through hoops to do so. I'm pretty good when it comes to html, css and a bit of php but even I found the workflow back to front. Yep if you want to use someone elses design right out of the box use Wordpress. If you have a custom design then steer clear of it and use one of the CMS mentioned by Murray. I favour Perch because its simple to set up and integrate with YOUR design seamlessly. The backend is uncomplex and easy for clients to use unlike Wordpress, which is overkill.

Wordpress is either for beginners who know nothing or professionals who know css, html and php inside out. Its not for anyone inbetween in my opinion.

[DS8108]

Thank you everyone for your helpful information and advice. I've gotten some good information here to help me get started again. I may work up another question over the weekend.

[DS8108]

Thanks. I'm looking into Perch now. I have one last isue with this new customer. I'm really venturing out to learn with this project. It is a non-profit so they have an extremely low budget. I need a free or very very inexpensive way to have parents sign their kids up for sports teams. I can create a form, have the results (name, address, etc.) sent to an e-mail address, but don't know anything about having them check a box, having the form calculated to a result, etc. Then I need the total to push to paypal. It sounds difficult, but I know there has to be something out there.

In other words the form will calculate like this:

first child = $90

additional children at $25 - 3 = $75

total = $165

Does that make sense? Like I said it's the calculation that I don't know how to do.

I don't have a problem with buying an inexpensive software, I just don't want a monthly cost when there isn't going to be big money involved.

Any help would be appreciated.

[MurraySummers]

HTML has no facility for doing these things.  Fortunately, javascript does!

If you have -

<input type="checkbox" value="90" name="first_child">

<input type="text" value="0" name="additional">

<input type="text" value="0" name="total">

Then you can get a total number by adding some javascript to each of the first two fields like this -

<form id="price" method="post" action="whatever.php">

...

<input type="checkbox" value="90" name="first_child" id="first_child" onclick="calcThis()">

<input type="text" value="0" name="additional" id="additional" onchange="calcThis()">

<input type="text" value="0" name="total" id="total" readonly="readonly">

</form>

and then adding this to the head of the page -

<script type="text/javascript">

function calcThis() {

     document.getElementById('total').value = (document.getElementById('additional').value * 75) + (document.getElementById('first_child').value-0) ;

}

</script>

The value shown in the total field will always equal the first child plus 3*additional (assuming that's the number of additional children).

[Ben M]

DS8108 wrote:

Thanks. I'm looking into Perch now. I have one last isue with this new customer. I'm really venturing out to learn with this project. It is a non-profit so they have an extremely low budget.

Just so you know, you should try to reach out to companies before you buy anything.  Many companies have unadvertised specials for non-profit organizations because they realize that companies work on a tighter budget.  Usually just providing documents which the non-profits have could save you money on the license or in some cases you may be able to get the solution you need at no cost.

[DS8108]

Do any of your have any experience with the following companies? Especially Perch? Any sites you can refer me to that are using it? I'm leaning toward Perch for this project since they are non-profit and need to edit very little information. It's very inexpensive and appears to be fairly easy to learn. I also like that I can pay and download it, then host on my own server.

PowerCMS from http://www.webassist.com

Perch from http://grabaperch.com

Content Seed from http://contentseed.com

CushyCMS from http://cushycms.com

Thanks, Donna

[Mcshifty]

You may want to check out Konductor (http://www.konductor.net), you won't have any problems like this:

Just to clarify, if you design your own site in CS5 using HTML, you cannot just import that site into a Content Management System. You can "integrate" the look and feel of your site by editing the CSS and some of the .php files, but it will be a completely different site than the one you designed.

Konductor just uses Dreamweaver and HTML to get set up on your side. Hopefully that's helpful.

[Guest]

One system we use that we found quite easy to implement is CMS made simple. The template system is quite simple to use as it can render any HTML and CSS as a template with the use of Smarty tags.

I use this CMS system being a northern ireland website designer. If you require any help with the CMS, let me know.

[DS8108]

Is this cms free? Or do you have to host your site with them? Do you keep everything on your own server?