Will TOTAL CMS work with stacks other than Foundation?
Can you create new webpages and link to them like you were creating them in RapidWeaver?
Are there additional security considerations from having these websites accessible via CMS?
Yes, Total CMS is a stacks set, and will work with any theme/stacks out there.
Yes, you can use Blog like that. It does not make new pages in the RW document, but you can make new pages and easily link to them.
Not really, it comes with Protect stack, which is similar to his PageSafe stack, which is a password protection stack.
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Thanks Robert.
Do you know whether or not there are any Operating System Requirements to run the software?
Could I run CMS from two different locations using two differently configured iMacs?
(assuming, of course, that i had individual licenses for each machine)
Hi Tim. Joes total cms is awesome imho. I use it and love it. To your last question. Total cms is essentially all within rapidweaver and the associated project file. So if your machine runs rapidweaver it runs total cms. It is not a stand alone entity. The cms license is per domain and not per seat/computer. So, in theory, if you had two machines running rapidweaver with the same stacks etc installed, one could simply move the project file back and forth and work on the projects and (and the total cms stacks) on each machine. Of course once your rapidweaver project is published with the cms elements, one can then edit all of the content that was set up with total cms via any web browser without constraint. Hope that helps.
Thank for that info Dan,
Rapidweaver has really changed how I make customer presentations for my cabinet shop. Rather than ricochet a bunch of PDF files and jpegs around what I am doing now is creating web pages for each project.
The great thing about this is I can annotate the drawings and produce anchor links to take customers directly to images that explain the drawings.
Could I add anchor links etc on the fly with CMS once it was up & running?
I can’t fully get my head around what your needs are. Nothing on your end…just not fully grasping it. I don’t quite get the annotation and anchor links question. From experience I know it’s difficult to convey an idea to others via text in this forum 
. That said As I read your post I think the blog feature as Robert alluded to would work wonderfully for this. One could essentially make a new post per project and supply a post link to the client. Feel free to share more detail and I, along with others I’m sure, would be happy to offer more input.
One other thing to mention. While I love total cms there are other blogging and cms like options that might make more sense. I’ve never used it…but Poster stack gets a lot of good feedback here, and might be a good fit if you only need the blogging functionality. I suppose I’m wondering if your needs require a cms per se or simply blogging functionality?
You can add links in Tcms blog. Why don’t you show us an example page of what you are doing and that would make it easier to suggest “how” to do it.
Thanks guys for paying attention to my problem.
I don’t know enough about CMS or blogging to understand the differences. What I do know is I spend a lot of time communicating design concepts to my customers. Something that has been working very well for me lately is to post my drawings on a web page rather than just emailing them or going thru the acrobatics of drop box.
The things I like about this approach are that the drawings are really easy to find when talking with someone on the phone. With web pages I can additionally append the drawings with running commentary and/or links to other pages on my site. My goal is to one day be able to augment the drawings with audio input and/or turn them into videos altogether.
Some of this also has to do with amortizing the cost of design. My thinking is that if one customer has a question a lot of other customers have that same question. The people who come to my site are passionate about their project. They will stay up till midnight in their pajamas pouring over pinterest because they really want to get it right.
I envision a blog as a sort of searchable database about all things kitchen remodel related. The blog needs to have some kind of Dewey Decimal system so that drawings or photographs can be quickly retrieved. This is why the kitchens on my gallery are numbered and why the individual pictures or drawings are also numbered. When talking to a customer on the phone it is really easy to reference and quickly find KITCHEN-13 / PICTURE 5.
You can easily build those pages in Tcms, there are several fields you could use to search by that would return that page. Also each page can have its own separate photo gallery if that would help.
After reading more of your requirements total cms would be a great fit imo. As others point out the blogging feature should suit your needs to create pages and comment on said pages. With total cms you could also open up a world of picture galleries, file uploads and downloads etc and be able to interact and update them without the need to be around rapidweaver. This might create more business flexibility for you and offer your clients a way to engage with your site. There’s a what I would consider small learning curve with total cms. Joe offers a project file that one can reverse engineer (the way I learn best), and once one understands how it works the possibilities are almost endless. Best of luck.
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