Converting existing non-cms site

Hello all,

I have a small company in the Netherlands, working on the bigger picture in sustainability issues. We’re just two people, and I built the website myself (www.except.nl). While it looks fine to me, maintaining this site which has grown to hundreds of pages is quite a bit of work. Every time I want to add a project or a topic somewhere, I have to fire up dreamweaver and go through the elaborate process of making a new page by hand, with all the links and so on. All the thumbnails and images need to be resized by hand, the flash application that shows the scrolling images needs to have its text-file updated, and so on. Also, this needs to be done twice for each page, as there’s an english and a dutch language option. That gets old really fast.

I would like to switch to a CMS. Interaction is of much lesser importance to us than manageability of this big site, and being able to quickly make new project pages. We don’t want to switch to drupal or something because our current design would be so hard to do in it, and we already have all this work on there. We like the current design and want to keep it. Most CMS solutions require us to completely re-make it, and that would just give me nightmares.

Looking through the MODx project, it looks like it could be our salvation: a mature and extensive open source CMS that allows every page to just look the way we designed it. However, we have little experience with PHP and CMS systems, and we have no idea what it would entail to actually get this off the ground.

Is there anyone who could give us some insights on wether MODx would be suited for this, what approach would be the best, and how much effort we should be expected to invest?

Just as some background: I’m an architect and my partner is an industrial ecologist. While I am not a web programmer by far, I did make many HTML websites in dreamweaver, made some flash applications, installed wordpress and some other off-the-shelf systems on our webserver (which runs on linux/apache).

Thanks in advance,

MODX can definitely support and do this and the same time it would make it easier! All your headers, footers can all be at once spot so you wouldn’t have to redo everything over and over. You create new pages with new documents so it would definitely be something you can look into.

This might help you think about some of the issues:

http://bobsguides.com/porting-your-site-to-modx.html

That all looks great. Thanks for the info and links.
What’s not clear to me is if there is an easy way to have images converted and thumbnails generated, and column flow of text, and perhaps the flash text utility be updated as well.
The way it’s described in the sent link, it’s really not that much extra work to just take an existing plain html site and copy in the text and save it.

The MaxiGallery snippet handles photo galleries very well, but you would probably have to upload each file to the site (although MG makes that fairly convenient). I don’t think there is a bulk upload feature for MG, though I could be wrong. Thumbnails would be generated automatically as you upload. One warning, though, MG does it’s processing on upload (sizing, drop shadows, etc.) so make sure your MaxiGallery snippet call is the way you want it before you upload all the images, otherwise you’ll have to upload them all again.

Not sure about the Flash stuff as I’ve never used it.