I spent a couple of months building my first website and found a lot of help in this forum. It’s time to give back a small contribution!
If I would have known some of the things I explain here, I would have probably spend less time in front of my screen...
....so here are some tips for the New Bees. Wish you a lot of fun with your site! And any other contribution to this "avoid-mistakes-from–the-beginning" is welcome!
1. Read the Docu, it really helps! http://www.phpwcms-docu.de/the_docu.phtml
2. Page layout:
Use „CSS Div“ or „Eigene“, at the beginning it may look more difficult, but as soon as you get into it, you can do much more than with Tabs. Also, the expert world says that tab designs are from the last century.
3. Navigation Tags:
Think first carefully about the navigation system you like to have. Phpwcms gives you a lot of possibilities, but you do not have to use them all!
4. Templates:
Use the „Beschreibung seitenebene“ in Templates for your meta-descriptions and the „schlüsselworte“ in each article for the meta-keywords. Google will appreciate it!(If you write them in the head section of the template, Google will later complain that there is too many doubles)
5. What are all those files within htdocs?
Here is where all “programme instructions” are saved. All files may have a reason to be there, so don’t delete any, but also don’t be afraid of modifying some of them like frontend.css, conf.template_default_.inc , nav_list_ul_hcss.css … Results are amazing! But ALWAYS make a copy before! You don’t want to mess it all up!
...and by the way, you can use more than one frontend.css, if you want your templates to have different characteristics:
- save the new css datei in template/inc_css (give it a different name)
- choose the css datei you like to use for each template (field CSS datei).
* Note that the CSS Standard shown in the admin page of phpwcms is always the original one.
6. Browsers:
Work with firefox and forget about explorer old versions. If it works with firefox, it will also work with safari, opera and almost everything on Expl. version 8. It’s not worth the headache that older explorer versions will cause you.
7. Here are some nice features, easy to implement: (thanks Santcho!)
http://forum.phpwcms.org/viewtopic.php? ... ow#p120995
http://yaml.phpwcms.org/phpwcms-horizontal.phtml
8. If you are trying to do something new, you have followed all the instructions but still, it doesn’t work, 90% of the times, you have made a mistake with your css/html code. Just check that all ; / (= “ are where they should be! For the other 10%, you may find an answer in this forum!
Cheers
Olga