How do I get to a specific page on my web site?

If you have a page at the top level of the page hierarchy on your site that you have named say... '25 questions I Hate'
The address to that page would be...
http://www.your-site-name.xyz/
followed by
?25-questions-I-Hate

How do I use my images?

If you are inserting an image into a web page using the content management system then the link to any image is...
userfiles/images/image-name.jpg

What is the address of my files for download?

To list a file for download...
http://www.your-site-name.xyz/
followed by
?download=file-name.ext
Note: To use this method the downloadable files cannot be in a sub-folder.

How do I change the template for my site?

To Change a Template... Login to your website and go to... >> Settings >> CMS

Under the section 'Site' you will see a heading template next to a drop down box that lists the available templates in your templates directory. Just select the template name that you want, then scroll down and save it.

The process should now be complete. Just logout and you will now see the new template for your site.

To access CMSimple Administration you must first Login to CMSimple. To do this, look for the "Login" link, generally at the bottom of the page and select it. When the login page is shown enter your password and press the Login button. You will then enter the administration and editing environment.

When logged in you should see the admin menu bar at the top and the content editor added to the page.

The administration menu has the following...

Edit mode/View mode - switches from edit to view mode and back.
Pages - Pagemanager for page administration.
Files - Upload and manage any files you want visitors to download, documents, media and so on.
Settings - Controls ALL aspects of the CMS.
Plugins - Shows the administration panel for any of the plugins installed for additional features such as donations, galleries, media streaming and so on.
Logout - Logs you out of CMSimple.

If you are using a program external to the CMS, that cannot be directly administered by the CMS, such as a guestbook, filemanager, forum, customised help and so on, the admin_123 plugin will provide administration and other links for them...

Once installed you can use it by logging in to the CMS administration and selecting 'plugins' on the admin menu. Then select 'admin_123' and follow the options from there.

You must be logged into CMSimple administration to access the online page editor

To Edit any pages you need a web browser such as Microsoft's Edge or Mozilla's Firefox. I must admit I have a bias toward Firefox... it's security focused, Open Source and available for most major operating systems.

• Download Firefox

Editing in Firefox

Due to security precautions, some of the editing controls do not work as expected in Firefox. These editing controls can be enabled with scripting....

If you don't want to bother with this then the standard keyboard shortcuts are fully functional. The basic keyboard commands are listed below.

• Copy use Ctrl + C
• Cut use Ctrl + X
• Paste use Ctrl + V
• Select All use Ctrl + A

NOTE: The Edit menu accessed from the menu bar at the very top of the web browser window works normally.

The pages of your website are stored sequentially, the Home Page first, into a single flat file database.

As of CMSimple-XH 1.7x the pages are separated by HTML comments in the content file, so H1-H6 can be used to structure each page and you are no longer limited to a 3 level page hierarchy.

The page management tool makes it fairly easy add, delete and rename pages. When logged into the CMS select 'Pages' from the administration menu.

You delete a page with the page management tool. When logged into the CMS select 'Pages' from the administration menu.

There used to be a conflict between page titles and page navigation menus. The text of the page title was used as the text for the navigation menu link. You wanted the text for the navigation to be as short as possible.

CMSimple-XH 1.7x Series

This limitation no longer applies and page titles can be as long as you like.

The following plugins are available from this site.

• Customised external links - admin_123
• Count your visitors - countx
• Picture gallery - zgallery
• Stream media - zplayer

For a list of plugins see... www.cmsimple-xh.org/?Plugin-Repository.

Installing a Plugin

There are two methods to install plugins...

Via basic CMSimple Scripting
<div>#CMSimple $output.= plugin_name('_setup_info_');#</div>

CMSimple-XH specific plugin include code
<div></div>

The parameter _setup_info_ supplies any external setup data needed by a particular plugin. This is only required when multiple instances of the plugin need to run. In many plugins this parameter can be left blank.

When you are logged into CMSimple Administration you can enter the setup for a particular plugin by selecting its name from the name of the plugin from the drop-down plugin list. This will display the plugin administration menu bar. The menu allows for the complete administration and customisation of the relevant plugin - stylesheet - configuration - language - help.

For web picture galleries try the zGallery plugin for building a gallery automatically from a folder of images, available from cmsimple-cms.com... Simply upload your images to a pre-defined folder and they will be thumb-nailed, titled and displayed as a photo gallery

Images are titled based on their filename. The file's extension is stripped off and any underscores "_" or dashes "-" are replaced with a space. A special delimiter character "~" gets replaced with " - ".

More Information... zGallery Help

Image names must be plain text. You can not have characters such as an  &  ;  $  @  %  and so on in them.

This may seem rather old fashioned but I think it is better to use an underscore or a dash instead of a space in any image or file name, as the space is automatically converted to %20 by most content editors. Given the WWW is moving to responsive design in web pages, dashes are the preferred way to go. All file extensions should be in lowercase.

some_image_name.jpg
OR (preferred)
some-image-name.jpg
NOT
some image name.jpg
which becomes
some%20image%20name.jpg

Doing this helps when editing in HTML mode as the file name can be more easily identified.

A free program to rename your images as a batch for the Windows OS (and Linux under WINE) is Irfanview. http://www.irfanview.com/

Before you begin you will need...

An image editor.
If you do not have one The Gimp is a free and open source picture editor.
http://www.gimp.org/

A image batch edit and rename tool.
If you do not have one try Irfan View which is free for personal use.
http://www.irfanview.com/

Things to consider...

Important Note: DO NOT use unprocessed straight off camera images in your galleries. They are far too big and will take up a huge amount of disc space.

Pictures for your web pages should be less than the width of the content area of the page containing the image. This led to average full content width images of about 600px. For a gallery image the limitation on the image size is the size of the display device. So pictures for a gallery are of the order of 600px to 800px up to 1000px in their largest dimension are in order for desktop and laptop devices. Images for a gallery therefore, are usually batch processed to either 600px, 800px or 1000px (or whatever common size you decide) in their largest dimension and then uploaded. The more usual size is 800px.

jpg images are compressed and as such loose image quality with successive edit. All editing (correcting colour balance, fixing blemishes and so on) is better done with a lossless form of your images. That is, convert the images that need retouching to either a lossless bmp or png, do your reprocessing with these and convert the results back to jpg saved at approximately 80% quality.

A free program that can convert your images between image types (jpg to bmp and back) as well as resize larger camera images as a batch for the Windows OS (and runs on Linux via WINE) is Irfanview. https://www.irfanview.com/

Resizing images ready for uploading to a web gallery using Irfanview.

Open IrfanView
Go to... File >> Batch Conversion/Rename
In the Batch Conversion window look at the right hand file management section.
Here you can locate and add the images you want to covert.
Next
On the left hand side is where you set the picture details you want to change.
In... Batch conversion settings >> Output Format
Choose: 'JPEG/JPG - Format' from the drop down list.

Click on 'Options'
In the 'JPEG/GIF save options' window
Set jpg 'Save quality' in the range 75% to 80%
None of the tick boxes need to be selected.
Click OK to save the settings and close the window.

Activate 'Use advanced options'

Click on 'Advanced'
In the window 'Set for all images'
Activate Resize
Select Set new size >> Set long side to: [ Enter Value ]
Enter Value = The full size value for your images in pixals, for example 600, 800 or 1000
Select pixels
Activate 'Preserve aspect ratio'
Activate 'Use Resample'
Click OK to save the settings and close the window.

In... 'Output directory for result files'
Choose/Enter the folder you want the images saved in.
Press 'Start Batch' and the selected images will be resized ready for uploading.

Converting images from one graphics type to another using Irfanview.

Note: Damaged or problematic pictures should be converted to either RGB True Colour, Lossless image BMPs or lossless PNG (by setting its compression level on saving to zero), for any retouching work.

Open IrfanView
Go to... File >> Batch Conversion/Rename
In the Batch Conversion window look at the right hand file management section.
Here you can locate and add the images you want to covert.
Next
On the left hand side is where you set the picture details you want to change.
In... Batch conversion settings >> Output Format
If you want to convert them to bmp... Choose: 'BMP - Windows Bitmap' - from the drop down list.
Make sure 'Use advanced options' is not selected
In... 'Output directory for result files'
Choose/Enter the folder you want the images saved in.
Press 'Start Batch' and the selected images will be converted ready for retouching in your favourite image editor.

Most websites today are based around the concept of responsive design so it would be a helpful how this would impact upon your image choices.

See... The Image Challenge - Using Images

When CMSimple loads the 'zgallery' plugin, it installs a lightbox for you. You then have lightboxing available for any image on your web site.

For displaying a linked image in a lightbox add the class "lightbox" to the image link and to display an enhanced link title add the class "showInfo" to the link.

NOTE: The lightbox plugin relies on the jQuery javascript framework which must be present for the lightbox to function.

More Information... lightbox-images-readme.html