Thoughts on themes or layouts

I am looking to use a PHP based CMS this summer for renovating my fitness website to allow me to do updates and such with less time and effort getting this setup.

I just started looking at CMSs and there seem to be so many out there.
It seems like all the ones i have looked at use themes/layouts for the pages.
I really havent had much time to look into these things but would prefer something else if possible.

I would like to have a cms, that didnt use themes or layout managers, where I could just hardcode some page somewhere on the site to have a phpInclude and whatever necessary div tag to be appended in front of new page.... then all the necessary footer information to be compiled onto it afterwords using another include statement.

This way I can change my design easily and then whatever i have in my header and footer includes get changed throughout the entire website, by just changing those certain files around.

Any one found a CMS like this?

 

Can't think of any offhand. Without knowing which features your site will need from the CMS, it's hard to answer.

Try the site linked below for CMS comparisions and info:-

http://www.cmsmatrix.org/

 

For the CMS I am basically looking for a CMS editor that has a html/regular text box that lets me paste in my text... hit ok after giving it a title and such.

Then it compile my page as title.php with my header and footer files I have being called, and thats all.

Are the themes difficult to incorporate what you want them to do? Could I have it just be an included statement?

 

Most CMS themes are simple enough to customize, if you know HTML. It also helps greatly if you know some basic PHP.

I'd suggest you download some free themes for some of the CMSs that have the features you want, and have a play around with the code. You may find that editing them to your liking is simpler than you think.

 

If you already know code, in Word Press (because that's the one I know), if none of the thousands of free and premium themes don't fit your needs, you can design your own, or hire some one to design one for you, or do what i do...find a theme that you like and change a few things around, and make modifications to fit your needs.

If I can do it , it must be pretty easy. You have access to all the files, you can change any thing that you want.

 

Get yourself a base domain. Install Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal. Then learn how to admisister them.

You are really going the long way around with what you are suggesting.

Buying a theme or template that sits on top of a popular open source CMS and taking advantage of all the plug ins and add ons will save you a ton of time. But first thing you need to do is understand how they work. I'd start with a basic install of each. It's time consuming upfront but will save you so much time down the road.

I did this with all 3 of the above. Then I started with Joomla and now I do most smaller projects with wordpress and custom plug ins.