Are you looking for a great free CMS?
Tuesday August 19, 2008
I've got this site I maintain that I need to give access to the owners and content developers. One of them is quite proficient in HTML, the rest, well, if I tell you they only got high speed internet last year, would that explain things? I've decided I want to use a content management system (CMS) to manage the site. It needs to be easy to use for the content owners and easy for me to maintain. But how to decide? I've installed Joomla! and Drupal to test and even got e107 to try. Then I came across this article from Web Distortion: 13 free CMS options for Web Design Professionals Reviewed. Paul did an excellent mini-review of 13 free CMS tools, plus there are several other ones he didn't review listed below. But man! I didn't know I had so many to choose from! At least now I have some idea.
Comments
I use Snippetmaster. It is easy to use and easy to integrate into my own site designs, instead of having to learn a new software. It was made to work with CSS styles and it is very user friendly (as simple as using a word processor).
The site owners can’t add pages or work with forms or scripts but they can do everything to keep it up to date and change any other info.
In addition to Snippetmaster, I use a PHP news script that supports photos and news articles, with titles on the home page and content in the news section (including database archives) and I have a few PHP calendars my clients can manage on their own.
The combination of these tools allows the most inexperienced users to be successful, which is my goal for any client.
Check out snippetmaster at www.snippetmaster.com.
I found a Drupal implementation very difficult the first try, but there is an extensive community there to help. I was able to offer an extensive suite of publishing tools for the client upon completion, I will say that.
I’ve used, reviewed and written about a number of CMS over the years. Although the “Big Guys” are getting far better and more flexible, I’ve really fallen in love with a little product called CMSBuilder from Vancouver’s InteractiveTools.com.
This lightweight and clever CMS is not a framework like Drupal/Mambo/Joomla. It can create blogs and editable pages in moments by embedding snippets of code into your regular pages. Because of it’s plain PHP format I’ve been able to bend it around corners.
Not for the Plug-n-Play crowd, but for those who want atomic level control, this is great!