CMS Made Simple Tutorial and Installation How To

This tutorial describes how to use the CMS Made Simple software with your NEXCESS.NET web hosting account. NEXCESS.NET specializes in hosting CMS websites and this tutorial is meant to help you quickly setup your CMS Made Simple Content Management System with our web hosting service. Throughout the rest of the tutorial, I'll abbreviate Content Management System as CMS

CMS Made Simple is an open source script, meaning that you can distribute and change it freely.

For the sake of this tutorial we'll assume that you own the domain 'johnsmith.com' and are setting up CMS Made Simple at http://johnsmith.com/cmsms/.

Follow these steps to complete the tutorial:

1. The first thing to do is to run through the SiteWorx MySQL tutorial and create a database for CMS Made Simple to use to store the information it needs.

   Create a database called 'cmsms' with a user named 'cmsms'. When you do this SiteWorx will prefix the database and user names with some text resembling your domain name.

   With our example domain of 'johnsmith.com' the database name is 'johnsmit_cmsms' and the username is the same 'johnsmit_cmsms'.
2. Download the latest version of CMS Made Simple from the CMS Made Simple website and unzip the contents of the zip file to your desktop using http://winzip.com.

   You should now have a folder on your desktop called 'cmsmadesimple'. Rename this folder to 'cmsms'.

3. Upload the 'cmsms' folder to your web hosting account. You can do this using an FTP program. If you don't know how to do this, check out the FTP tutorials on our tutorials page.

   Once the CMS Made Simple files and folders are finished uploading, you need to change the permissions on some folders in order for the script to access the folder properly. You can do this using the CHMOD command in your FTP program. If you don't know how to do this, check out the FTP tutorials on our tutorials page. Change the permissions on the folders as follows:

   • CHMOD the 'cmsms' folder to 777
   • CHMOD the 'cmsms/smarty/cms/templates_c' folder to 777
   • CHMOD the 'cmsms/smarty/cms/cache' folder to 777
   • CHMOD the 'cmsms/uploads' folder to 777

   Once you've set the correct permissions, you can now access the setup wizard. For this example, we'll point to 'http://www.johnsmith.com/cmsms'. If you receive any errors, make sure you've given the folders the correct permissions. Your screen should look like this:

   

   This page is just checking to make sure you've set the correct permissions. Click the 'Continue' button to continue. You should now be on the database settings page. You need to enter the information for the database you created in step #1. For this example, we'll enter the following information:

   • Database name: johnsmit_cmsms
   • Username: johnsmit_cmsms
   • Password: mypassword

   Everything else can be left as is. Your screen should look like this:

   

   Click the 'Continue' button to continue. If you receive any errors, go back and make sure you entered the correct information in your database. The script will now create the tables for your database. Your screen should look like this:

   

   At the bottom of the page you should see some path settings. These should all be correct so you can leave them as is. Your screen should look like this:

   

   Click the 'Continue' button to continue. You should now see that your installation is complete. Your screen should look like this:

   

   Click on the 'CMS Site' link to continue. You should see a warning telling you that you can't access your CMS site until you remove the 'install.php' file. This is for security reasons. Using your FTP program, remove the 'install.php' file from your web hosting account. Your screen should look like this:

   

   Once the file is deleted, refresh the page and you should see the main CMS site. Your screen should look like this:

   

   From here you can read through the instructions to get your CMS Made Simple installation working how you'd like it. Your CMS Made Simple web hosting installation tutorial is now complete!

   For more information on how to use CMS Made Simple once it's installed, check out the CMS Made Simple FAQs.

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