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CMS Made Simple 1.6.x Beginner's Guide Review

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I had the chance to review a new book for the CMSMS platform.   "CMS Made Simple 1.6.x Beginner's Guide"(published by Packt Publishing) written by Sofia Hauschildt, a tutor, consultant and programmer, this book is a beginners guide to learning the basics and so much more of CMS Made Simple.

So you may right off the bat be wondering is this book for me.  Let me tell you, if you are new to web design or have years under belt of practical experience, this beginner’s guide book is for you.  I must say that beginner’s guide may be not quite the best name for this, it’s more like “Nuts and Bolts” for CMSMS.  Even with my history with CMSMS, I a module developer, spotted a little something I didn’t know about due to the fullness of CMSMS.  This means 99% of the CMSMS can pick something up from the first CMS Made Simple tutorial book (published by Packt Publishing).

Right off the bat if you are a complete novice, even a mom and pop store trying to put up your first web page, you get a complete over view of the basics of working with the tools need to do an install from FTP to what to get in the way of host setup information.  Now if you need hosting notice the Rackspace ads around this site… take a look at them as they are a service you can come to me for.  That’s right hosting on a Rackspace server which support from yours truly on the only network I trust.

As you move thru the book the methodology used in this book is straightforward and effective step by step. You are told what you will be doing, you are guided through the process of doing it, and then you are told what you just did. This repetition of information facilitating the learning process is key is getting the most out of the CMS Made Simple tutorial book (published by Packt Publishing).   As most things learned observation and participation is key in the retention of the information.  With the step by steps, screen shots and “What just happened?” recaps you can line up what you’re doing and what is in the book for a fully guided tutorial. Furthermore, there are quizzes that test your comprehension of the material covered.  If you diligently follow through in a linear fashion, you will learn all the basics and so much more of how CMS Made Simple can be used to build a great web site.

The coverage in which Sofia approached Smarty was also worth a note. Smarty is the template engine used by CMS Made Simple. Without an understanding of what Smarty is and how it works in your templates and pages, you would be at a huge disadvantage when approaching a web design template based projects.  See the true gain and power of CMSMS is that you don’t really need Dreamweaver or Frontpage for an editable one time creation of a website and this is effectively possible do to the Smarty engine.   Her coverage of the subject leaves you with a very good understanding how Smarty functions and gives you many ideas of how you can use Smarty tags to simplify site design by harnessing the power of Smarty.

There is an excellent discussion of how just about any web template can be converted to work with CMS Made Simple and it is surprisingly easy when you apply what you learned about Smarty tags to that task. You also learn how to build a template from scratch as well as how to import templates obtained from other sources.

As you continue through the book you are gently guided into more advanced topics and taught how to incorporate various features into your website such as form pages, inserting YouTube videos onto pages, learning how menus and sub-menus work and are displayed and so much more.  Best of all many code snippets are presented in the book. A big plus for the first time web creator is the packt publishing website has all the code available for download in a zip file so that is a big help since you can use them to see side by side where you got off track for error free code.

If you want to learn editable website creation using a CMS, get this book.  What you learn in these pages will save you hours of frustration and question asking in forums. This book is not a reference book on CMS Made Simple however, so if you are looking for a comprehensive reference book, this will not satisfy that need, but in spite of that though it actually is quite comprehensive in that it does cover most every important area of using CMS Made Simple in a really well written way. Sofia writes clearly and in a very straightforward, uncomplicated way.

I would give this book a must read.  Cheers -Jeremy