phpwcms Support Forum

For those of you that are having trouble getting started with phpWCMS, I sympathize and offer my own notes:

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phpWCMS Quick Start
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Please Note: phpWCMS does not have pre-installed template 'skins' to quickly change the look of your site. You have to do some HTML design work to create a phpWCMS site. This is both a curse and a blessing. phpWCMS is very flexible and powerful from a design point of view, but you must put in a little time up front.

This tutorial assumes you have a working installation of phpWCMS 1.1 RC4.

The basic steps of site development using phpWCMS:

1) Go to the Page Layout area and create a Page Layout to define the very basic page areas or blocks. For this example define a Page Layout that includes a left column (for navigation). Look at these page examples:





2) Go to the Template area and create a Template to contain the actual HTML code for your pages. (Templates rely on the Page Layout for their basic structure, typically a table). You can add as much HTML or CSS as you want here--remember the areas you see here are just containers for your HTML code. Next, tell phpWCMS where to render some content using what are called Replacement Tags (this is the fun part): at a very minimum, enter the {CONTENT} and the {NAV_TABLE_SIMPLE} Replacement Tags* into any Template areas along with your HTML code. These will render your articles for a particular site area along with some simple navigation. Look at these page examples:





3) Go to the Site Structure area and create a Site Structure level (AKA category) and associate that with a specific Template using the drop-down menu there. Look at these page examples:





4) Go to the Article area and create Articles within a given Site Structure level. Use Content Parts to add content and control the visual presentation of that content. Experiment with different Content Parts to see how they work. The articles will be immediately visible as a list (or single article if only one exists) on the page that you have assigned to that Structure level. Follow these page examples:











Next create another article and associate it with your home page.

Preview your site--it should look like this:



if you followed the example you will see that the site looks very simple. At this point you will want to go back and add your own HTML/CSS to the Template. It's easiest to create a page design in Dreamweaver (or other WYSIWYG editor) and then cut/paste the code into the Template blocks.

Make sure you check 'visible' and 'public' in each area of the Admin interface or else you will end up with blank pages.

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*More detail about Replacement Tags:

http://docu.fhss.de/replacement_tags_en.shtml (courtesy of Pappnase)

S.

hello steve

thanks for the quickstart guide.

but it's in the wrong section so i moved it!

Why did you move it? This belongs in the Support section!

I would say it belongs to 'Documentation' cause that's what it is IMHO.

duergner wrote:I would say it belongs to 'Documentation' cause that's what it is IMHO.

hello

sorry it was my mistake! imy mention was to move it to the Documentation part of the forum! so i correct it.

hello

one little hint

you can use normal html code for the templates! you don't need use the div's like in the graphics above. also for testing you can use the replacement tags itself.

for an simple start you can use in the

left - {NAV_TABLE_COLUMN}
main - {CONTENT}

and later you can go on and make a fine tuning for the layout!

thanks very much Pappnase!

Pappnase wrote:hello

one little hint

you can use normal html code for the templates! you don't need use the div's like in the graphics above. also for testing you can use the replacement tags itself.

for an simple start you can use in the

left - {NAV_TABLE_COLUMN}
main - {CONTENT}

and later you can go on and make a fine tuning for the layout!

Hi,
I did step by step everything in the tutorial but my pages are allways blank, no text and nothing in them.
What did I do wrong?

Thanks
Giuseppe

hello

did you set all visible!? or did you hide all!? there can be a lot reasons!

Yes all visible, I did exactly the steps of the tutorial... but didn't install the 2 programs ImageMagick and GhostScripts, could this be the reason?

microweb wrote:Yes all visible, I did exactly the steps of the tutorial... but didn't install the 2 programs ImageMagick and GhostScripts, could this be the reason?

and you did put in data in the "templates" fields?

Yes, I put: <div align="center"><b>Ciao questa è una prova</b></div> in Header (I think the translation is header because my language is Italian) and

<div style="#ffff00">{CONTENT}</div> in Body and
<div>{NAV_TABLE_SIMPLES}</div> in Left

hello

so it didn't work

palce the Tags in the fields in the pagelayout then set to div design. save all call the index.php.

In the "Site Structure" I don't have the "Article Count" available. I would like to have several articles displayed on my index page. How do I get this added? I appear to be using 1.1 RC2.

Thanks,

Chris

Hi

I'm not shure (Ver. 1.1RC2 was before my time ) but I think that you have to update to 1.1RC4 or if you want to Ver. 1.2.1