Grayscale BandSite CMS Ver. 1.1.4

Introduction

This is the Grayscale BandSite CMS. This is essentially a website that contains its own special content management system. It uses a fixed list of optional content types to present what amounts to the most common options on band websites.

Unlike most content management systems, such as PostNuke/ PHPNuke/ or Mambo, you are not limited to using the rather rigid layout of the CMS. In fact, the site can more or less look however you want it to look. The downside, however, is that you kind of need to know what you're doing when it comes to making a website. If you're inexperienced, that's OK too. If you follow the instructions below, you should do OK.

Get Help

The #1 Resource for help should be the Grayscale CMS website - http://www.grayscalecms.com. There you will find documentation, a messageboard, sample code and other helpful information. Please be sure to contribute to the forums so that your experiences with BandSite CMS can be used to benefit others.

License

This software is licensed to you under the Common Public License. See http://www.opensource.org/licenses/cpl1.0.php for more information

Server Requirements

***NOTE - There's somewhat of a "bug" with the upload of MP3s on version 1.x - namely with the fact that it can often take a while to upload MP3s. PHP comes with a "max_execution_time" setting of 30 seconds. This is a security feature. If a script is left to execute indefinitely, it can overload and crash the server. If you run into problems with uploading MP3s, this is the reason. Ask your host to increase this setting, but don't be surprised if they say NO.

Instructions

  1. Create the database for your site. Take note of your database name, username, password, and hostname. You'll need this later for the config file.
  2. Create your tables using the supplied SQL file. This is where PHPMyAdmin comes in handy. Open up the "bandsite_cms.sql" file and dump it into PHPMyAdmin's interface for SQL commands.
  3. Configure your site. Go to the "adminpanel" folder and open the "includes" folder. In that folder, you'll find a file called "config.php". This is your configuration file. It is HUGE. Version 2.0 will have a web-based configuration, because this config file is somewhat of a pain to deal with. The config file is pretty self-explanatory. Just be sure that you are mindful of the PHP syntax stuff. You should see how it is done once you get into it.
  4. Assemble Your Site. This is where things might get a little tricky. Unlike some Content Management Systems, I'm not requiring you to use any templates. This can be a good or bad thing, depending on how you look at it. On the positive side, you retain complete design control. On the negative side, you have to do a little more work in designing and assembling your own template. Here's how:
    • First, What to Know:
      • All pages of the site generate their content in a <div> called "content"
      • All presentation (colors and such) generated by the CMS is dictated via a CSS file called "display.css". Don't like a color? Change it in the CSS and it is done throughout the site.
      • I have created four dummy files: "header.php", "footer.php", "navigation.php" and "template.php". I've also created some mockup CSS files. You can use these files to see how everything works. You can also just modify these files to suit your needs and use them.
      • The goal is to create your own header, navigation, and footer files. This will create a "wrapper" or template. Take a look at the "page_structure.html" file to see where I'm going with this.
    • So, Let's Make a Template (aka very quick intro to PHP Includes)
      First, a quick note - you can upload this whole site as-is with my dummy files, create your database, and have a working site, albeit ugly as hell and pretty sparse on images!
      • just like any site, you're gonna design your site and create an HTML page.
      • Once that page is designed, you're gonna carve it up into little pieces. Remember the "page_structure.html" page? Carve it up so that you have "Section 1" named 'header.php' and "Section 2" named 'navigation.php' and "Section 5" (or Section 4 and Section 5 if you're using a 3 column layout) would be 'footer.php'. Save these files in the "includes" folder.
      • Be mindful of the PHP stuff in the header.php include. Feel free to use my mockups as a backbone for your site and you can benefit from things like multiple style sheets, page-specific meta keywords and all that.
  5. Upload the site to the server
    Now that you have everything set up, you can go ahead and upload the site to your server. IMPORTANT NOTE
    This CMS is intended to be uploaded into the document root of your server - NOT A SUB-DIRECTORY. Installing this CMS into a subdirectory will cause errors to display.
  6. Modify Directories - Change Permission Settings To "777" For The Following Directories
    • /music/
    • /images/fliers/
    • /images/gallery/
    • /images/merchpics/
    • /images/releasepics/
    When you unzip the program and install it to your server, it will come with a number of directories already created for you, yet have nothing in them. The directory list above will be where certain files go when you upload them for things like MP3s, fliers, etc. But in order to be able to upload files to these directories, you will need to change the permissions on these folders to be "777".
  7. Start entering content!
    Once you've followed the steps above, simply login to your control panel using the username and password you set up during configuration and you can then begin entering content!

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I frequently update the scripts on my site, often to add enhanced security. Many of these updates are completely free and are 100% compatible with the script you just purchased. Join my mailinglist at www.karlcore.com/mailinglist to be kept up to date.