CMS Sugestions

I'd just put up a Wordpress blog if you have PHP capable server.

I would like to do this but my wordpress template building isnt apto scratch.. I can extensively modify any template but wouldnt know where to start for a blank page!

You could just use the stock template that comes with it and modify the bits. That's what I did when I used Wordpress.

Currently I use a CMS that I wrote from the ground up but I haven't open sourced it. Maybe someday. It runs on Windows Server (ASP.NET) so you may not be interested in it anyway.

There aren't any good CMSs out there that aren't going to require a decent amount of time spent learning how things work to be able to produce good sites.

Truth.

cushycms.com is very simple but it isnt server hosted. its very similar to what i require. Very basic and clean for the client. Sometimes I think even wordpress is too much for clients to take in. lol

At least it's not Joomla. Customers will curse you to your face if you try to deliver a Joomla site.

hmm I was gunna go with joomla before wordpress didnt have a clue though and the general support on wordpres was an awful lot better. SOOO have you had a glance at the site i linked it has a video with a demonstration and it looks very simple indeed.

If I can't have the files and host it where I want, I don't know that I'm interested in using such a product. I didn't look beyond that.

lol precisely I want them hosted on my server not somebody elses :'(

Let me know what sort of hosting you use. I tried my cms on godaddy but they will not change the security level on their windows servers and some of the newer technology requires a bit more elbow room.

1and1 I dont really have many limitations on the server I use I have access to pretty much everything I guess.. I havent had any problems anyway.

WordPress isn't really a CMS but it has growing pretensions to being one. WP is really rather simple to template and actually does a fair impression of a CMS now it actually has a menuing system and the new custom posts extend things quite a bit.

Like Tyssen says though they all require a modicum of learning no getting away from it.

Someone mentioned Joomla

Using "pages" as, well, web pages and posts as the blog it does a fair job of being a CMS. It even allows you to choose one of the pages as the home page instead of the list of blog entries. If I still used PHP I'd probably concentrate my efforts on Wordpress.

*barf* Sorry, it was me.

Yep it's entirely possible to remove nearly all of the apparent blog functionality from WP using 'Pages' and /or custom posts with perhaps a custom category files stripped of comment call backs and other blog template tags. Biggest strength for wordpress is the amount of third party plugins that extend it in endless ways, some are very sophisticated and can with a little work really change the look and feel and UX a great deal.

I love me some WordPress. It's my bread and butter. In my 4.5 years of using it, there has only been one project handed to me that I haven't been able to do successfully in WP.

What did it require that WP couldn't handle? Or was it to be hosted on a server without PHP?

I am a bit of a CMS junkie, so I go "shopping" now and then, because zealots aside, there is no one system that will do everything. The right tool for the right job.

Wordpress is a favorite of mine, it's extraordinarily capable, and as Hugo said, is nearly unmatched in great plugins. But now with all the newbies showing up, they get all excited at how easy it is to install and get a site working, and OH WOW, zillions of free themes! And oh boy, one-click install in their host, often lame Godaddy. All of a sudden reality sets in. They want some change in their look, and they have never ever looked at HTML or PHP. They don't even know what FTP is. They have no tech skills, so when they ask for help, no one can even understand what they're talking about. They're shocked, SHOCKED, when no one will give them help for free when they're rude or have not described their problem in a way that a human can fathom. I see this as a big trend, as I do some help on their support forum. The most popular ecommerce app for it has plenty of irritating bugs, and has for years, even though it basically works.

If someone is self-sufficient, and is willing to troubleshoot, and has decent tech skills, self-hosting can be great. Tyssen is right, there's ALWAYS some work in getting up to speed on a system, no matter how good or easy it is. Most people are not willing to put in much work to do that. For those people, I would recommend a hosted solution like Cushy, Expression Engine, etc. But no one wants to pay anything, of course.

For the expert developer and very capable and persistent learner, Drupal is highly powerful. It's over my head, even though I've tried it several times. For easier systems to get up and running in a self-hosted fashion, there are CMS Made Simple, MODx (my other fave), Concrete5, and loads more. And it all depends on what kind of content you want to have.

A weird situation of user management roles and what certain roles had permissions to do and some of the permissions weren't feasible to the way that WP works. Yes, I know about all the User Role plugins, but some of the situations the client had went beyond what WP is capable of doing. I've went to a WordCamp and talked to core devs who even said that it's not something they've ever heard of before nor think possible within the constraints of WP.

A ground up re-write is being released sometime in the first quarter of 2011.

Aye you hit it on the nose flamenco, I too have a position within the WP community on one of it's projects and spend quite a lot of time on the projects support site and there is a great deal of what you describe going on.

I'm afraid the the nub of the problem is the very title of the thread 'CMS' it was the notion that these could be produced and then that they could and should be made usable by those with no experience what so ever, this was a mistake. I do not hold with the view that the internet or more specifically the www should ever be closed in any way but I do believe that it's not a god given right that everyone should have a web site and that others should have to support their endeavours. Their ought to be a entry level, a level that each and every user is required to reach before they can start playing around or stick with the hosted blogger or wordpress accounts.

ExpressionEngine isn't a hosted solution. It's closer to ModX than it is to Cushy.

Duly noted. EE is a paid system, and similar to MODx (which I use every day) and I had mistakenly thought it was hosted by them as well. I'm also surprised that people ignore wordpress.com (not ORG!), which is not only already hosted, but free!

That reminds me of a time that I came across a question on the Wordpress forum where somebody was wanting to dump Expression Engine for WP. EE has this extremely specific styling scenario for a tag cloud, obviously using some custom code to apply a unique class on every single gewgah, and then generating styles for it. I laid out a plan to get almost exactly the same result in WP using only CSS. But of course, duh, it required writing some CSS, and actually looking at some code, and (horrors!) actually thinking. She went all ballistic and indignant, just AMAZED that WP couldn't do the same thing. Of course, I thought of the obvious reply - use EE, not WP. But I just opted out of helping that person, knowing that reasoning with a fool would be a waste of my time. And then excoriated her in my blog.

Hugo, Great point. Because WP has massive popularity, people want it to be all things wise and wonderful. And it can be... but you inevitably have to touch code if you want any serious customization, whether in presentation, the back end, or in any plugin.

The simple reality that the bright-eyed newbies do not grasp is that the worse their skills, the more they'll need to pay someone, be it a developer, or a company that hosts their thing and gives support. Or at least they should be VERY polite if they want free help. Any system faces this onslaught of silliness as their popularity increases. I'm sure this is exacerbated by the crappy economy.

After having personal terrible experience with Joomla, I'm stunned that anyone likes it. I guess if you install it successfully, don't want to customize, and have one good plugin that works, you could like it. And I'm glad to hear that WP-ecommerce will be re-written. I worked with it last week, and just shook my head in disgust. I have heard better things about Eshop, which has purportedly continuously improved.