YAML DevBlog | An (X)HTML/CSS Framework

conceptCMS & YAML

April 8th, 2009 by Dirk Jesse | Content Managment Systems | 1 Comment

This article is a guest post written by Stefan Lamby, one of the developers of "conceptCMS", a feature-rich open source content management system with a complete integration of the YAML CSS framework.

The number of Content Management Systems directly supporting YAML is growing. Today, I just want to point your attention to another Open Source CMS with built-in YAML support. The product, conceptcms (www.conceptcms.com), has been developed as commercial software since 2001. Now it is available under the GNU GPL since the end of 2008. Apart from features like out-of-the-box support for multi-customers and multi-languages, it comes with a rather sophisticated  CSS handling.  You are able to create as many style sheets you need and they can be organized in groups. There is a "Master CSS" (+ a version for IE) which will automatically be included into all templates. There is even a small CSS editor tool to work on your style sheet code.

Using YAML in conceptcms is easy: Just download the free YAML package here (either CSS only or a version with a simple example template) and do an import in your existing conceptcms-Installation. A selection of YAML CSS will be available in the "Styles" section of conceptcms, grouped into "YAML" (the core) and "MyYaml" (Styles you might want to modify).

YAML CSS in conceptcms "Styles" tab

conceptcms CSS editor

Importing and working with YAML within conceptcms is described in detail on this page.

Contrary to many other CMS, conceptcms does not ship with any "built-in" default template to display a Website, but you can either create your individual template/s from scratch (as a combination of menu item templates, structural/functional templates and HTML templates), or use free themes and templates available for download and import. These are all build on YAML style definitions. As an additional feature, conceptcms allows you to define "CSS exceptions" at menu item level (a "menu item" in conceptcms represents a navigation item and is used to dynamically integrate content from different documents or other sources), so the developer has full control where YAML CSS should be included and where not. This might be very useful if you want to implement new parts of your existing Website using  YAML, but can't change existing style definitions for older parts. Another interesting feature: conceptcms supports code generated by YAML Builder. You can use YAML Builder and paste the code into the respective CSS. When saving the CSS, conceptcms will re-write all paths (e.g. to images required for the sliding door navigation) to fit the directory logic of conceptcms. No further manual editing required.

The HTML code geneated by YAML Builder can then be used as a basic template for a "Menu Item Template" in conceptcms.

Once you feel comfortable with the numerous options the system provides in the styles context, it is very simple to work with YAML in this CMS. In addition, the conceptcms team is committed to use YAML as their standard for every theme or template they will offer in the future.