Developers' Overview

The underlying philosophy of madCMS is: simplicity! It is intended to fill the gap between the large open-source CMS such as Druple, Joomla or Mambo and the basic "blog" style of CMS such as WordPress.

Once you have installed madCMS on your host, setting up and configuring the new website is relatively straightforward -  but it does involves a small amount of HTML and CSS knowledge. 

Of course, you can run madCMS "out-of-the-box", but you probably will want to at least change the banner image!

Like many similar simple CMS, madCMS has one "control" page (pageDisplay.php) which pulls in various functional components such as the menu and content area. In madCMS, these components are called "nuggets".

Some of these nuggets, such as the main menu and page content, are automatically included in the basic website. Other nuggets, such as the "News", "Events" and "Shop" functions are triggered on and off by editing the master configuration file (refer to the installation notes).

The default site installed is a simple two-cloumn layout with a top banner and horizontal drop-down menu.

The "look-and-feel" of the website is controlled entirely by cascading style sheets (CSS). By default, there are two stylesheets installed, one covering just the main menu and the other controlling the rest of the site.

To completely change the appareance of the site, simply edit or replace the stylesheets.

The horizontal drop-down menu is based on one created by Stu Nicholls and uses pure CSS - no javascript. This code does have limitiations, but these are far outweighed by the simplicity, elegance and maintainabilityof CSS.

Thoughts...

You're only given a little spark of madness. You mustn't lose it. (Robin Williams)