Information on the RGCMS

The RGCMS was created to be a versatile and user friendly content management system. After working with several CMS packages out there, I decided that I'm going to make my own, with the main idea behind it to be usable by people who are not web developers or programmers themselves. In other words, extremely simple and user-friendly to use.

What puts the RGCMS apart from most other CMS packages, is the fact that the administration panel (where you log in to add and edit pages, create photo galleries, etc.) is a seperate entity from the actual website, even though they appear to be one entity. With other CMS's, you can usually do template adjustments and stuff like that as well in the admin panel, which in the end meant that all the websites have a very similar look and feel.

Now, with the RGCMS, we create the template from scratch with our in house graphic designer, and the look and feel is totally unique. Only then do we build the CMS into the actual template, meaning that you get a unique website design, but you can still manage the content yourself.

Here is a summary of the features of the RGCMS:

1.  Add, edit and delete pages

With the RGCMS, you can create as many pages as you want (limited only by hosting server space available). This is done via the administration panel with the "Pages" module. When creating a page, you give it a name, title tag, keywords meta tag, description meta tag, and the actual content.

The content is entered with a WYSIWYG editor (What You See Is What You Get). This works similar to popular word processor software, like Microsoft Word. You can make headers, paragraphs, bulleted lists, links, tables, images and more. Everything is very straighforward, and several tutorials are available on how to do specific things - and, if you can't find the answer to your question, send it to us, and we'll add it to our blog!

If you would like to paste raw HTML code into the page, this can be done via a "Page Extras" section, where you can add several "page extras", that you can paste your google adwords code for example.

The pages can also be up to 2 levels deep, meaning a page can have sub pages, and the sub pages can also have their own sub sub pages.

You can also have a page link to an external URL (like your blog, for example), or have it not appear in the menu at all (but you can still link to it). Even if it should happen that your pages have more than one stylesheet file, we can make it so that you can select a different stylesheet for each page, giving each page a different look and feel!

2.  Photo Galleries

The RGCMS has a built in Photo Gallery module that is a 3 tier system - that means you can create as many galleries as you want, and each gallery can have as many albums as you want, with each album having as many photos as you want.

For example, lets say you are a photographer, and create a gallery for Weddings. In the "Weddings" gallery, you can create an album for each couple that you took pictures for. When uploading the pictures, they are resized automatically, so you don't have to worry about that before hand (although it helps to speed up the process if you do...). And the thumbnail is also automatically created.

Also, depending on the look and feel of your website template, we can customize the sizes the photos resize to when you upload them, as well as the size of the thumbnails. And of course how the galleries, albums and photos are displayed on your website.

3.  Form Builder

The newest, and possibly coolest feature of the RGCMS, is the custom form builder module. This is a very straighforward and easy way to create contact forms for any of your pages, and you can create as many as you want, each with as many fields as you want!

When creating a form, you specify the email address where the form must be sent to when submitted, as well as what the subject line must be. Also, it was developed to use the Gmail SMTP servers, so you just enter your Gmail username and password, and then the emails are sent through your Gmail account, which means you can view all the submitted forms in your Gmail sent items section, which also means a free backup of everything!

After creating the form, you can create fields for it, and can choose 8 different field types:

Text box, which is a one line box that can take up to 255 characters of text (you decide how many characters), you can also set its size, the label, title text (which shows when you hover of the field), as well as whether it is a required field or not (if it's required, then the form won't allow the user to submit it without filling in that form).

Email text box, basically exactly that same as the Text box, but it takes an email address, and when submitting the form, it makes sure that it is a valid email address.

Drop down box, if you want the user to select something from a list, this is the one to use. Specify up to 50 values in the list, and even specify which option is selected by default.

Country drop down box, which is the same as the Drop down box, except for it is automatically filled in with all the countries in the world.

Date selector drop down box, which allows you to give the user an easy way of selecting a specific date. You can easily specify the date range of the date selector.

Text area, which is what you use to give the user a big box to write you a message in. You can specify how big it should be.

Radio button group, which is similar to the Drop down box, but instead it gives you radio buttons, allow the user to select a specific option.

Checkbox, which is a box that can either be checked, or not checked. Handy for a "I accept the terms and conditions" type field, which means you can flag it as required as well, meaning the form won't submit if the box is not checked.

And then, a CAPTCHA is automatically put in at the bottom of the form, to prevent spammers from stealing your form. You also specify to which of your CMS pages the form must redirect to after being submitted (like a custom thank you page for example...).

4.  Call to Actions

These are links that are set up in your RGCMS beforehand, which can be text links, pictures, or basically anything you want, and then, in the Administration panel, you can specify to which page each Call to Action must link.

An example of this would be to have a big red button that says something like "Contact Us for a Quote", and then you can link it from the RGCMS administration panel to your Contact Us page for example.

Another example of this can be a Privacy Policy link in your websites footer area, that can be linked to a Privacy Policy page that you can create in the RGCMS.

5.  Users

You get a username and password that you use to login with at the administration panel of your RGCMS, but you can add additional usernames and passwords as well, and change your own password as well when you are logged in.

6.  Help section

The help section is a ever growing part of tutorials and articles on how to use the RGCMS. If you do not find exactly what you are looking for in the Help section, feel free to submit your question, and we'll add it to the list!

Costing

The RGCMS costs a once off fee of R6695.00, plus R1440 for 2 design options.

This includes the following:

2 unique Template designs, to your specifications, with not more than 3 sets of changes. Our in house designer will contact you directly regarding your design.

Tracker software, allowing you to track statistics about your site visitors.

We will populate up to 5 pages for you (homepage and four other pages, please provide these in separate word documents, and include any formatting you would like on the actual pages as well), that will act as a guide on how to create your own pages.

We will also do the SEO on your homepage, which will help with your search engine rankings.

The hosting is separate at R1080 per year, which includes:

150MB server space
600MB bandwidth per month
up to 20 email address, which we setup for you on the server
Free support and bug fixes

Domain Registration for a .co.za costs R250 per year, and for a .com/.net/.org it costs R200 per year.

So, to summarise, a full RGMCS would cost you:

That is with hosting included. If you are already hosting somewhere else, we would give you your first year's hosting for free if you move over to us.