Migrating an existing site to Easy CMS

(Pat Weedon) #1

I preface my enquiry by saying I am new to Rapidweaver and a designer/illustrator rather than web developer.

Having set up a small site in ‘Foundation’ cms was requested. Using ‘Easy cms’ I have set up an admin page and added core stacks to it and the content pages.

The advice from Joe Workman is to:

  1. Develop your admin area first. Remember that you will need to publish this page with at least the Admin Core stack to your server in order for the CMS to function properly inside RapidWeaver.

  2. Save your existing content into the admin area that you want to manage with the CMS. Text, images, video, etc.

  3. Now you can start replacing the content inside the actual webpages using the CMS stacks or the text macros.

My questions are:

  1. Are you able to publish locally using Mamp? Which I have been using to this point.

  2. What is the process for saving the content to admin area? Is this done in edit mode in Rapidweaver,in the browser or do I place the content directly into the cms-data folder in the exported site?

At the moment I can’t get any content to save to the admin area (other than pasting the text in the place holder text boxes) either in edit mode, preview mode or in the Mamp local site.

Thank you for any help

(scott williams) #2

You have to have php running on your server.
I would advise that you should go ahead and publish to a web server, if not, you will have to change some settings and move some files later anyway. Best to just do it from the start. If you don’t want to disturb a live site, publish to a subdomain of the site, not a folder, that will make your life easier when you are ready to go live. Add pagesafe or protect stack to both the admin and the public pages while developing, that will stop access and stop search engines from indexing the dev site. Using two separate partials for this (one for admin and one for public) will simplify process when you are ready to go live as well.

You can save text content in RW preview mode.
Normally you would just add it to the admin page in your browser.

(Pat Weedon) #3

Thank you for that Scott. I did wonder if I needed to publish to the server to make things happen but hadn’t appreciated the php significance. I will take onboard your the additional advice also.