A few weeks back, a friend of mine and I were talking about website design. He had mentioned that he had some client sites built in iWeb, and was interested in taking it to the next level. I mentioned that it was a hobby of mine, and that I had even spent a while doing it for a living. It got me to thinking about how much I enjoyed doing design work and CMS integration. While I had maintained a small list of client sites during the last few years, I certainly had not been going out for more (or new) work. It was decided that I would be handling PHP / MySQL integration work for our new clients. It was time to have a presence on the web again.
I had initially started AtechG’s new site design in Drupal, which is a great CMS, and which I have a few clients using to manage their sites. What was nagging me about a Drupal site is that I really had no knowledge of templating for it, and when I began reading the documentation for Drupal templates, I quickly became lost in a sea of code. I began to do some research into various CMS systems and how easily they could be integrated into existing websites. This is paramount, as this is what AtechG is going to focus on; converting existing static websites to full blown CMS systems using a clients existing web site template. Drupal didn’t fit the bill on this one (for me at least). I managed to stumble onto CMS Made Simple (CMSMS).
After reading through the CMSMS site, forums, and development blog, I came across a video tutorial on converting XHTML templates to CMSMS themes. My jaw literally hit the floor at how simple it was (or seemed at least). I very quickly downloaded the package, a few themes, and installed it on my development server. After playing with it for a few hours, I was sold, and the package was very quickly installed on the production server. After some CSS tweaking, a lot of learning, and some content writing, AtechG.info went live. The one issue I have with CMSMS so far, is the blog modules. None of the modules offered were really as full featured as I had hoped. However, that was quickly remedied with a rather painless integration of the WordPress publishing platform.
