Installation is fairly straightforward. Copy the entire nixCMS folder tree to the webserver. In a typical installation, the root folder '/' will contain a single folder 'nixcms'. nixCMS doesn't have to be installed at that location - but some paths may need to be changed if you don't. Once, installed, the home page should be displayed by going to http://www.yourdomain.com/nixcms/ with a web browser.
The main nixcms/ contains the main files for the CMS. There are then a number of separate sub-folders. The admin/ folder contains the administration/editing pages and javascript, together with required CSS, XSL and image files.
The content/ folder contains the user generated content. In this case the user is probably the web-site owner.
The site/ folder is, as it's name suggest contains all the site files - excluding any content. This includes CSS, site images and
XSL template files.
Once installed, any file in the content folder (or sub-folders) can be retrieved. The URL would look like: index.php?file=filename.ext. At first glance this is pretty useless.However, it is worth bearing in mind, that using nixCMS you can set access/permissions for different users. You can also use nixCMS to change or replace those files. The main facility offered by nixCMS is the ability
to generate web-pages from the content using a global template.
Content is saved in '.page' files. These are fairly normal HTML files but any global layout or navigation/menus are omitted. It's the actual content of the page with very little else added. Instead of simpy retrieving these pages nixCMS transforms them using an XSLT style-sheet. This adds global headers and footeers to each page. It can also do any amount of post processing of the content that you may want to do. (Limited only by your ability to craft XSL style sheets.)
It is assumed that the content will be in basic html format, but this isn't actually a requirement. You could take any XML content and transform it. it isn't limited to HTML.
There are four levels of user: public, user, moderator and administrator. Public users do not have to login and can see any content that you wish to make available. Users get t osee all of the same, if they login they may have additional access rights. Moderators can use the administration panel to edit the content of the site. They cannot howerver, modify the site itself.
You may not want the user to have to type /nixcms/ or make that visible in URLs. If the entire site, is generated by the CMS, it makes sense for the /nixcms/ part to be hidden. Simply copy the index.php file from the nixcms folder to the root folder. Change the base path in this file from being '' to 'nixcms/' or whatever location you have used for the CMS.
In this document, a revision is a change to the content. Revisions are intended to be done by the user/site owner. There is currently no explicit revision control. Ideally content could be checked in/or out of a version control system (eg SVN). Users can take snapshots of the content by simply saving a copy of the 'content/' sub-folder.
We use version control to refer to changes to the entire site. This comes about when the site/owner or their web designer wishes to make global changes to the appearance, layout or structure of the site. Version changes also occur when the site owner/web designer wants to upgrade to a newer version of nixCMS. In a real world situation, these are quite likely to happen together.
The process for developing a newer version of the site is roughly as follows. Create a new folder at the same level in the hierarchy as the existing site. So you might end up with a root folder containing 'nixcms/', 'nixcms1/', 'nixcms2/' etc. Though you can choose any names you like. You would probably start by installing the latest version of nixCMS. Though you might simply copy the existing site across. having installed the latest version of nixCMS you would then copy just the site files across. That's mainly the files in nixcms/site/. At the moment, you may need to check for any conflicts where a site file might override a modified version of the nixCMS file. This can probably be designed out in future versions.
Once a working version exists, the content can be copied across. Users can then check the new version by going to that folder. Once the new version has been approved, latest content can be installed. Then simply change the base path in the root version of index.php to 'go live'.