Advice for Site-Structure-Design

[tantra]

I used the last couple of days to get some impression of various CMS. I tried some demo installations and at the end of these days, it seems like elxis will be my choice. The goal is to port an existing site to elxis in order to subsequently extend it with dynamic content. Although I did not do it yet, I'm pretty confident that I can port my CSS design to elxis templates.

The current site is static except for a guest book and even after porting these parts shall remain static content, with no social web gimmicks. Moreover, it will be extended with further static contents in the future. I guess that autonomous pages will do most of the job, but ... some pages use additional CSS, e.g. to place collections of images. Is there any way in elxis to have extensions to the <header> section of autonomous page? I.e. not by defining a separate template!

In addition to the static content the site shall be extended by a blog and a shop, which is why I'm doing this after all. Furthermore, a seminar schedule with online booking and generation of vouchers is planned for the farther future. And who knows - probably a forum one day. All content shall have a coherent look and feel.

So my question is about experiences with such a setup, which hopefully is not quite exotic. Are there any modules / components, which I should consider? Are autonomous pages a good idea for the static content? Is there a way to have dedicated <header> material? If not, how complicated would it be to write a module? (I expect the Frontend part to be fairly simple, but I have no idea concerning the Backend so far.) Any other advice concernig structure, tools, etc. which is beyond the FAQ?

Thanks for your help and this great CMS,
 - lars.

[datahell]

Elxis has various tools and extensions that can do what you need. For instance you can use the easy gallery bot to display a gallery inside content items or autonomous pages without having to mess up with code or the template headers. There is component IOS Reservations (commercial) for your bookings and component eForum to use as forum.