Get Simple and Xerte

[grantgz]

I am a teacher who wants to use web pages to present topics to my students. I want the simple and cleanest CMS system because my students usually use smart phones and the limited screen size really constrains the amount you can put on a page.
I have used GetSimple for a few years now and it is amazingly simple to use and gives a consistent look to each page. The only problem I have had is navigation - I am really restricted to about 5 menu items on the heading.  I did try a second level menu a while back but that added a menu on the right - which narrows the content on a  smart phone even more. Perhaps there is a way to do it somewhere but the constraint is more the window size than GS. Usually I have this and last weeks topic on the menu, make a fairly long scrollable page for each and turn on and off pages on the menu as required. This makes a very simple page suitable for English language learners - I have also run Moodle and my students frequently get lost and confused in a maze of disappearing menus.
I have just started using Xerte (https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/xerte/index.aspx) which looks like an excellent way to extend GetSimple. Xerte creates navigable pages including some really nice templates as an iframe embedded in a GS page. I am sure others are already embedding frames but this is almost as easy to use as GetSimple itself. My five navigation buttons stay in place while the students can navigate in the frame.
Anyone else tried Xerte?

[shawn_a]

never heard of it, but there are plenty of css solutions to this, although i will admit GS is severely lacking in quality responsive themes. But it is easy to adapt any free or commercial theme.

[Carlos]

There are Bootstrap themes for GS too...

[grantgz]

never heard of it, but there are plenty of css solutions to this, although i will admit GS is severely lacking in quality responsive themes. But it is easy to adapt any free or commercial theme.

I am sure I could use a Bootstrap theme with a hamburger and get cascading menus. However the reason I find Xerte so interesting is that it gives fast creation of content and a neater way to navigate for the site I am designing.

Xerte is not a theme but is a content creation system designed specifically for education. When you install GS you have the nice stuff of consistent presentation and menus but you have blank pages. I know my html and can create tables and bullet points, images and links but this is read only for the student. Creating a marked quiz or drag and drop labels to an image is beyond my skills.

This is where Xerte comes in. Using their toolkit, standard tools like gap fills, multichoice and other interactive teaching tools can be created very quickly as a series of pages. This presentation can then be embedded into the GS framework.

My website will have a menu consisting of a home page, a blog, and two to three pages containing the Xerte generated content. Each frame has a linear navigation which steps a student through my class activities.

I am still playing but this fits in between GS and a full blown and complicated LMS like Moodle and looks very useful for an educational website.