well there isn't a "concreteize me!" button, so it is going to involve some hands on work.

It should be reasonably easy to take any HTML chop and create some editable areas in it. So taking your current design and making it a concrete5 skin is minutes or hours, not days or weeks. Moving content today has to happen by hand however, so that can really eat some time..

we're dancing with a import from XML spec that might make this easier for some, but I think the real answer is: you're moving - take advantage of the opportunity to rearrange stuff and perhaps rethink decisions you were stuck with before.

Thanks Franz, I suspected as much.

Since deciding to go concrete I’ve had to brush up my css and html.(Essentially Im a designer) sooo,

I thought I would get a book and have a look at php as well. There seems to be a few issues in moving from a Dev server to the real thing not to mention other things, (skinning blocks and such) and I want to do as much as I can.

Do you think there is any value in me doing this? Do you know of a good php book title that is helpful in the concrete environment?

Nige

sadly im the last person who should be advising you on which PHP book is the best.. I always liked o'reilly stuff when i was doing production..

For a really automatic way of moving existing site you need only two things:

1) PHP Simple HTML DOM Parser
http://simplehtmldom.sourceforge.net/...

2) Knowing, how to use Concrete5 API
http://www.concrete5.org/help/building_with_concrete5/developers/mv...

You have to create rules for parsing old site and use API to create pages of certain type, with attribute setting, block creating, etc...

It's not an easy process, but it is the only way for a "concretizing" really big static web-sites.

Thanks everybody for your help tips and tricks, the support on these forums is really good.

Nige