Welcome to CMS Made Simple

From CMSMS

This tutorial originates in a forum thread asking for moving a 70 page .html site over to cms without losing search engine rankings.

You have a site of 10-100 web pages. These pages are plain static HTML. You update them with a text or HTML editor and upload them to the hosting location with your favorite FTP tool.

Over the time, you have tried to keep some harmony among your pages. A templating feature in your HTML editor may have helped. But this tool has reached its limits : you can't easyly reorder the navigation, nor add new web features. Your pages begin to visualy diverge and it is a pain to maintain links.

Now you want a 21st century web site : a content management system taking care of templates, menus, links and other things like sitemap and RSS for you. You would like content updating be easy without knowledge of FTP or HTML/CSS. So you would like to motorize your old site with CMSms, strengthem its visual rendering and keep its search engines' rankings. Welcome, read on.

Step 0 : Discover, try and select CMSms

Firstly you should select CMSms among other CMS products. CMSms must fit your needs and you need to feel it suitable for you. In order to do this :

• Review its features and compare with other products. Read some product advocacy from happy users.
• Make your own opinion about it : try it on a fake hosting (may be play with it on your laptop with XAMPP). Install the sample content, which includes a tutorial. Try to modify/add pages content, templates/layout, menus, themes... Do you find it simple enough ? Is it intuitive for you ?
• After you have choosen CMSms, check its hosting requirements and select an approriate hosting provider.

Step 1 : Install CMSms on your production hosting

So you have a internet domain for your site, say domain.net. Your old plain HTML pages are available at domain.net/aboutus.html, domain.net/products.html, domain.net/solutions.html etc. And your old home page is domain.net/index.html. This name "index.html" is the default of the webserver as its configuration states :

DirectoryIndex index.html (example with Apache)

You are going to install CMSms which is PHP software. The webserver now needs to respond to it. Update your webserver configuration like this :

DirectoryIndex index.html index.php (still an Apache example)

This means that when domain.net/ is requested, the webserver will first look for domain.net/index.html (and still serve your home page) then for domain.net/index.php and then answer 404 not found if none is available. Hopefully your hosting provider already has set up this for you. As you are moving from the HTML site to the PHP one, it is important to have the indexes in this order, so you can build your CMSms PHP site while still broadcasting the old HTML one. When you are finished building, deleting (or renaming) your old index.html will switch your webserver to the new PHP powered site.

The idea is to migrate in the background and to switch when ready :

• Once you meet the hosting requirements, install CMSms following the guide.
• Keep your static pages along for the moment.
• Check the CMSms install is working. (you can copy/add a page/template/style sheet and modify it...)
• Check the old HTML site is still available. (domain.net/aboutus.html, domain.net/products.html, domain.net/solutions.html etc are still available)
• You can start to customize the dynamic site with themes.
• You need to activate external (webserver's mod_rewrite) pretty URLs. See the optional settings in the install guide.

Step 2 : Move your content

Now it is time to start "replicating" one simple static page and then to treat all of them.

For example domain.net/aboutus.html :

• Log in the admin.
• In the content, create a new page.
• Important : give it the "aboutus" alias.
• Set its title from the old static page's title.
• Copy the content of you old static page and paste it in the new page.
• Assign a template to the new page.
• (Backup and) delete the old aboutus.html file on the webserver.
• Browse to domain.net/aboutus.html to see the new dynamic content responding.

Check that links like domain.net/products.html still serve old static files and that links to and from the new dynamic page works. Then you can wait 2-3 weeks and see how search bots have responded to the change. If they treat it like the static file it has replaced, you can go on moving the content while keeping your URLs (and your ranking) thanks to aliases.

Lastly you move index.html's content, delete the file and thanks to pretty URLs the Net still sees your home as index.html.

Step 3 : Enjoy new features

You have now a dynamic site. You are able to manage more pages (and several editors) and keep harmony thanks to templating. But you get more than that :

• Menus are dynamic. You can customize them with Menu Manager.
• The map of your site is generated by a simple {sitemap} in any template.
• Play with the News module and export an RSS feed.
• Try other modules : RSS, Front End Users, AdSense...

How to install on a non dedicated database

You have web hosting with PHP and a database. You need to share your database with some other software you'd like to host along with CMSms.

No problem : CMSms prefixes its tables/objects in the database. You can even change the "cms_" prefix during installation to have several installations of CMSms sharing your database. Each installation has its own "config.php" file with reflects the prefix and other settings.