CMS recommendations for HTML CSS competent noob developer [closed] - html

Closed. This question does not meet Stack Overflow guidelines. It is not currently accepting answers.
We don’t allow questions seeking recommendations for books, tools, software libraries, and more. You can edit the question so it can be answered with facts and citations.
Closed 7 years ago.
Improve this question
so after a long break from it, I've decided to pick up web development again, and I'm having just as much trouble as ever, trying to pull apart and customise these CMSs. I'm getting a bit frustrated with it.
I'm pretty good with HTML and CSS, and can happily build websites that aren't linked to a Content Managment System (HTML, CSS, Javascript), but the complexity of a CMS seems to be too much for me to work with and understand.
I was hoping someone could recommend a dead simple framework for me to work with. Something that's really simple to understand how it works. I like the idea of a Flat File CMS, So far I've looked at Stacey, Grav and Kirby. I'm told these are simple to work with, but I'm still struggling to customise, and make the templates my own.
Ideally, what I'm looking for would be a cms where I could build the site in HTML and CSS and tack-on variables for things like image grids and menus into the HTML. Anyone heard of anything like this?
Cheers.

Self-hosted Wordpress would be my recommendation. As a 10+ year full-time web developer, I've used many CMSs and this one is always my go-to solution these days. I seem to be constantly migrating clients away from other outdated platforms to Wordpress. Or you can use Wordpress.com if you don't want to go the self-hosted route.
If you work well with HTML and CSS you can make any style or markup changes you require. If you haven't used PHP before, you'll have plenty of time to get familiar with it. Once you are comfortable with some basic PHP, you can begin adding whatever functionality you want to your site via a plugin or by placing custom functions in the functions.php file of your theme.
If you haven't built anything with Wordpress yet, or if you aren't comfortable installing it on your webhost manually, you can use a webhost that has Fantastico to auto-install Wordpress for you.
There are tons of mobile-responsive themes out there that you can use as a starting point for your site, many of which are free. It is recommended to use a child-theme for making your customizations. This will prevent a theme update from erasing your changes. If you are going to use a lot of javascript files it is also recommended to register and enqueue them inside the functions.php file.
It may take some time to familiarize yourself with Wordpress, but it should be well worth it.
For more info on all things related to Wordpress, check out the codex:
https://codex.wordpress.org/
There is also a new Wordpress Code Reference:
https://developer.wordpress.org/reference/
And if you run into any specific issues, first search here on Stack Overflow for the answer–it will usually be here already. If you can't find anything on your specific issue, create a new post with the details and someone will usually be happy to assist you.
Good luck!

You can start with Odoo CMS. It was prettier now on version 9, with more feature and flexibility.
You can download the complete source of odoo, and develop it develop it in local before deploy on your server.

Related

Sitecore, why is so difficult? [closed]

Closed. This question needs to be more focused. It is not currently accepting answers.
Want to improve this question? Update the question so it focuses on one problem only by editing this post.
Closed 9 years ago.
Improve this question
I am new to sitecore and my company has been using external company to manage their sitecore, which I totally understand, since it involved so much work on the development.
As a designer myself, I found extermely difficult to create a custom page unless I use what's already available. I could use simple page to insert my html codes but again, it's just way too long. In regular case, when you build a html site, you could simply create pages in dreamweaver and view it on your local computer.
I have tried to make a custom page with the presentation control, but each time I called a sub-rendering. the page is just a BLANK.
*so my 1st question will be, What's the procedure to create a custom page? *
I know sitecore suppose to be powerful and there is many api, I really would like to find out why I found it's so difficult......
my background is, designer base with knowledge of html, css, and php. I am not a developer that's for sure. :)
Thanks for taking time read my blah blah..:)
1st question will be, What's the procedure to create a custom page?
To answer your first question, there are some high levels steps you would generally take.
Create a page template that includes any fields or metadata you need to render the page
Create any layouts, sublayouts, or renderings necessary to render the custom page - this is where having access to a developer normally becomes necessary
Assign the renderings and datasources to the instance of your new template (or better yet, assign the renderings to __Standard Values item)
Publish everything out
You should reference the Self-Study to Building a Very Simple Site from Sitecore
2nd question will be, why do we need to call the developer each time when we want to have some feature inputs?
To answer your second question: To get very far with customizing Sitecore you will need to be a developer or have access to one. This can be mitigated to some extent depending on how flexible the solution is they developed. But let's be real - Sitecore is an Enterprise CMS, it's not Wordpress where you can install a theme and a few plugins.
As someone just learning, there are a number of options
Training from Sitecore - this is probably your best bet
Download and play with Launch Sitecore for sample code and examples to build a real website
Check out the Sitecore Marketplace for modules that can get things done for you
Subscribe to and read John West's blog for inside information of basically every aspect of Sitecore
3rd question is, why I can access the CSS?
This question doesn't make sense frankly, so I will assume it was meant to ask "How?" or "Where?" Without any more information about the site in question, you can normally map the URL to the location on disk. For example:
http://www.mysite.com/css/styles.css
This URL might map to c:\inetpub\wwwroot\mysite\website\css\styles.css
I do highly recommend that any code changes, including CSS, be done through your source control system and only be deployed following your standard release management.
Honestly, I don't believe you are qualified to modify and maintain the Sitecore site given your current training and experience level. The first step I recommend is getting that Sitecore developer training and any training available from your vendor on the specific implementation. Good luck!

How much faster is dreamweaver? [closed]

Closed. This question is off-topic. It is not currently accepting answers.
Want to improve this question? Update the question so it's on-topic for Stack Overflow.
Closed 11 years ago.
Improve this question
Hey everyone I just bought the master cs5 suite mostly for design purposes, and now I have a lot of peoPle telling me I should start using DW instead of hand coding my HTML/CSS because it will speed up my production and it's what all design shops use and is an industry standard . I was curious if this is accurate and how much would it really speed things up?
I (personally) disagree. I use DW in CS5 for code editing view only (it has the best markup/code highlighting I've found); the generated markup is not great, so I don't use it, nor am I highly trained in the workflow it entails. A lot of designers will not understand hand coding markup, but that's usually because they don't understand how to or don't care to do so because it's not what they get paid to do.
However, if you're working on (a) lower level, you have a better understanding of your markup/styles/code. It may take slightly/significantly more effort (depending on your abilities hand coding), but I personally think it's worth the effort in many cases. However, I am not a piece worker nor am I paid on deadlines.
There are other reasons I use DW (WebDAV support, searching capabilities), but I will likely never use it to author my markup. Also note I don't pay for it.
Used unwisely it won't speed it up at all. You'll spend more time pulling out DW's extraneous code. Use parts of DW that will make you faster like snippets (for storing snippets of code you use frequently) and find and replace (using f&r with regex is a very useful skill). I use it to cram in table markup quickly (for data tables). Dragging files over for internal links is quite nice and the keyboard shortcuts help (you can create custom ones).
That said, I like the product at work. Check in and check out has been very helpful there with multiple coders/designers.
So, there are plenty of parts in DW that will speed up your hand coding. Root them out.
Dreamweaver CS5.5 made a lot of improvements over previous versions. As a designer you may appreciate Live Preview and the design integration's. As a coding IDE, it's still considered sub-standard and many developers choose to go another route. I use PHPdesinger 7 for ~$70, its got in-line xdebug integration and pretty good intellisense for PHP, CI, and jQuery. I use DW5.5 and PHPdesigner and I find it's far less bloated then Dreamweaver for what I use it for, coding with PHP/Jquery and web API's. I also feel that it's closer to how I worked before using advanced IDE's like this, coding on my Macbook with Coda. But if your designing web pages you may like Dreamweaver better.

Are your SASS/Less stylesheets private source code, or public like CSS? [closed]

Closed. This question is opinion-based. It is not currently accepting answers.
Want to improve this question? Update the question so it can be answered with facts and citations by editing this post.
Closed 7 years ago.
Improve this question
Stylesheet languages like Sass and Less allow us to organize our stylesheets like real programming source code, in more modular and manageable ways than raw CSS ever could. Using these languages is still a young art, and I'm curious to learn how other developers use them in practice.
One of the neat features about the openness of the web is that we can learn from others by peeking at their HTML and CSS. However, these new stylesheet languages allow developers to keep their stylesheet source code private and only share the compiled CSS output. The standard compiler settings will often have the stylesheet source folder outside the public webroot.
If you use a CSS preprocessor to develop a commercial (closed-source) website, would you consider the stylesheet's source language (Sass or Less) equivalent to the CSS in terms of openness, or is it proprietary source code?
On the one hand, these languages "only" give us different syntax for writing stylesheets, so their function is the same as the CSS that's already publicly visible.
On the other hand, they could be thought of as "source code" and considered proprietary, in the same way as the Ruby or PHP that drives the site is used to generate HTML.
Looking forward to your thoughts.
Looks like you and I are the only ones following the css-preprocessing tag, I just found this and wanted to share some thoughts.
For the small company I work for, we use the same homebrew CMS to manage every site, and there is a lot of magic involved in creating the css files. I don't use LESS or SASS, but a combination of cssmin and my own code. There are theme settings in the CMS that can affect it, and there are other things like url rewrites that have to read settings from php config files. The output is always there for anyone to see, but I wouldn't consider the code that generates it "open source" any more than the code that generates the html output.
Our CMS is not open source, so our policy is that when and if (hasn't happened yet) a client decides to drop us and "wants his website", we generate a static HTML version for them with absolutely no php source code. So they would get the static version of the css/js as well as static html. They are paying for a service, and not so much a product. We don't sell the CMS, we sell our services building the site and access to those same tools. I'm not sure how well this would bode if it happened, but that's our current policy.
Anyways, this might not be exactly what you meant, but I'm looking forward to hearing more on this if anyone ever finds it.

Delphi - Is there a suitable WYSIWYG HTML Editor Component for VCL/FMX app? [closed]

Closed. This question does not meet Stack Overflow guidelines. It is not currently accepting answers.
We don’t allow questions seeking recommendations for books, tools, software libraries, and more. You can edit the question so it can be answered with facts and citations.
Closed 8 years ago.
Improve this question
I need a WYSIWYG editor Component that I can use in the Delphi application to create the body of the email in HTML.
We've used TRichView just recently to do HTML email functionality and found it quite adequate. We did evaluate WpTools and it does do exactly what we wanted however for our needs it was just too expensive especially when we always try and purchase site licences.
One thing we did find with WpTools is that it did implement a visual component or set of visual components that you could drop onto a form that implement the whole WYSIWYG UI (e.g. toolbars and such). It took a bit longer with TRichView to achieve the same thing.
Regarding conversion from/to html - TRichView can export html natively, however requires third-party libraries to import html which unfortunately (for us) are not commercially backed (i.e. community driven). So we've resorted to storing all content in RichText natively and only when sending the email do we convert it to html. WpTools has the ability to import/export to html natively.
I have been looking for this as well for several years now.
The best solution I found, until now, is WpTools from WpCubed. It's not an exact Html editor, but an advanced word processing component which offers a copy mode to and from html. I am currently working on using this component in my Sitestepper web creation software (in the StepEdit html-editor to offer wysiwyg possibility). I think that certainly for email editing this could be used (although maybe a bit pricy for what you are looking for). I know the author is working an a better exchange to and from html.
But to be honest, I don't think you will find anything if you need a Delphi component.
I used to use HtmlEdit from Purposesoft, but I think this product has got his limitations and it's not fully supported anymore. But maybe for your purpose it's ok.
I've used EmbeddedWB from bsalsa. Basically it is the same as Delphi's TWebBrowser, but you have access to more features of the IE automation object. In the browser I loaded an HTML which looks like:
<html>
<head>
<title>Edit description</title>
</head>
<body contenteditable="true">
</body>
</html>
Marking an element by IE specific attribute "contenteditable", the IE implementation let's you edit the element's inner HTML in a WYSIWYG manner. You can get the content by automation calls (check bsalsa.com to see how to read the edited content). If you get the basics it is pretty simple to create a full blown HTML editor.
Good luck!
My answer using Bsalsa Web Browser Components - very easy complete HTML editor/viewer.
delphi-how-do-i-make-a-basic-wysiwyg-html-editor-using-delphi
If using IE COM based components is not a problem then you can use this free product
http://bsalsa.com/product.html
I have just recently needed a free HTML WYSIWYG editor and I thinks this is the only thing out there. For me it works fine, but I don't need complicated elements. They can be done, but will a little more work.

Installable CMS similar to CushyCMS? [closed]

Closed. This question does not meet Stack Overflow guidelines. It is not currently accepting answers.
Questions asking us to recommend or find a tool, library or favorite off-site resource are off-topic for Stack Overflow as they tend to attract opinionated answers and spam. Instead, describe the problem and what has been done so far to solve it.
Closed 9 years ago.
Improve this question
I'm looking for a CMS system that works similar to CushyCMS, but that I can install on my own server?
I love the functionality and ease of use CushyCMS provides for simple, small sites where setting up and installing a traditional CMS (Drupal, Wordpress, TYPO3) are not necessary.
Anyone have any ideas?
Thanks!
Troy
Perch is an excellent lightweight CMS.
For what you're after I'd reccomend ImpressPages CMS
http://www.impresspages.org/
It doesn't use html tags, but its a very easy "drag and drop" style. with clear toolbars available to the site admin, obviously WYSIWYG editing isn't everyones favourite (it's not mine) but for 5 or so pages, it's perfect.
Orbis CMS is an open source alternative to CMSs like CushyCMS. It's built on the same priciples (simplicity, ease-of-use) and features a stylish interface, but is self-hosted and free.
"modify html pages simply by adding a class but that I can install on one of my own servers"
Unify does this very nicely unify.unitinteractive.com it costs $24.49 per domain, simply upload the unify folder to your webspace and add class="unify" to the areas in the html you want editable.
Another one ideal for a site of 5 pages is pulsePro http://pulsecms.com/
If you're looking to write some of your own code/html it might be worth looking at django-cms
Well, I don't know of any yet, but if you want an alternative online service then check out Surreal CMS. You can also try out Simple CMS, but it's still very new (released into beta a day or two ago).
You should look at Zimplit!
SnippetMaster is pretty cool. It's too bad that it's not open-source and free, but at least it has generous and inexpensive licensing schemes (normal, re-brandable, etc.)
It would be nice if it used class names for the content regions, but it uses HTML comments formatted a special way (like IE conditionals) so it's still valid html.
http://www.snippetmaster.com
I built this one www.kitgui.com so programmers can be programmers in their own language / framework of choice and use a REST-style interface to pull content and HTML 5 javascript reference to be able to let clients manage the editing experience directly on the website pages themselves. HTML 5 allows for the cross-site security to occur these days so everything just made sense to do this. In my ecommerce business its all about how fast you can setup things to get them out the door and get paid. KitGUI makes it so easy you can't really appreciate it unless you try it out. This is brand new so I have no idea if programmers like it or not except for my own devs who are biased of course. I know clients do for sure so please give me some feedback on it if you have time to investigate as I worked my ass off to launch it.
Something which is very similiar to CushyCMS is Unify CMS.
They have a demo which you can try before you buy.
You will see that Unify is very similar to CushyCMS and I quote:
You do not need to know PHP, nor do you need to write your code
specifically for Unify. In order to create editable areas on your
site, you only need to add “unify” classes to each element. That’s it.
There is no Database to setup, you just upload the files via FTP (or similar) and start adding in classes where you want to have editable regions. They have repeatable regions as well.
Unify currently costs 24.49 and is backed by a 45 day money back guarantee.
Support is powered by Desk.com
Take a look at Unify requirements and you will see you can run this in almost any server on the planet; well, almost any server :)