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Need some input on CMS for a kinda, sorta webby ...

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barney:
Have a friend who is about to start a sailing school.  He has an established Web presence on sailing schtuff, decent page rank, reasonable traffic, all the little things that seem to matter.

Seems as though, lately, everybody and their {brother|mother|sister|father|friend|cousin|wife} is asking for advice  ;).  The Capt. wants to know some stuff 'bout adding his new business to his Web site.  I'm thinkin' he'd be best off with some CMS, but am hard put to recommend a suitable one.  I'm aware of Joomla, Drupal, have a bit of experience with Concrete5 (?), but hard put to recommend one to him.  Searched here, but nothing found seemed appropriate to this situation.

He's middlin' conversant with HTML, a bit less with PHP, but he did manage to put together a [pretty good] PHP/MySQL-driven sales page (with a bit of help), when he and his SO were selling jewelry and Chinese stuff , in order to record clients, addresses, email, and other such business info.  Now he needs to revamp - not totally rebuild - his sailing site to include references to, and content from, his training/school.  He can add appropriate links & static commentary, but wants to be able to display notes from the training classes.  Sea stories, as it were, important bits about his students, their questions, and his resolutions to those questions.  Mostly, these would be teasers to entice other students, ya know?  They'd change on a periodic basis, perhaps every class.

Strikes me that a CMS would be ideal, something his admin could do from his class notes, but don't have a clue as to which one would best serve his purposes.  Don't want to start a flame war - I've seen questions like this do so on other forae; don't think that would happen on DC - but I'd really like suggestions as to a CMS that would
* be easily adaptable to existing page(s)
* be simple enough that a low-rent admin could enter appropriate material w/o Web page knowledge
* be readily expandable in case his endeavour blooms.

Thus, I'm once again asking for help.  (Oneathesedays I'm going to be able to help someone else - I hope and pray.)  Is there some CMS variant that would even come close to filling that bill of particulars?  Minimal learning curve, maximal adaptability?

mouser:
I can say with confidence that i would advise anyone who isn't a hardcore tinkerer/coder who loves to get involved with complicated intricasies to stay well clear of Drupal.  It's powerful but not something i would wish on anyone who doesn't want to sink an infinite amount of time into learning it.

Other than that, i can only second your instincts that a CMS would help him if he wants to extend and maintain a site himself.

JavaJones:
If you've got some time to tinker with and research the best solutions and just looking for some suggestions on where to look, I think perhaps Silverstripe? I'd mention Concrete5 also, but you seem to be aware of that, and it's also more commercial-oriented than Siverstripe (i.e. a lot of modules are not free with Concrete5). While I am familiar with and generally a fan of Joomla, I think it's really overkill for a lot of sites, particularly for what it sounds like this person needs. I almost suggested even just a Wordpress-based site, either working as a blog, or extended a bit to be a mini-CMS. This can actually work really well, but does have some potentially annoying limitations, especially if the site is potentially going to expand in the future and want things like ecommerce, etc.

- Oshyan

40hz:
@JavaJones- thanks for pointing out SilverStripe.

I've given several CMS systems a spin. But I never tried that one despite seeing very favorable comments wherever it got discussed. Seeing it mentioned here at DC inspired me to finally look into it.

I downloaded and gave it a run on one of my test systems last night. Very impressive. One of the easiest to use CMSs I've ever seen. Remarkably powerful too. Definitely gonna add this to the short list next time I have a client who wants to talk about setting up "a simple CMS system."

Thx again. :Thmbsup:



 

JavaJones:
My pleasure. I was just reminded of it again myself recently and was similarly impressed (though I haven't setup a local install to test yet). The fact that a lot of the modules and addons were also free, unlike Concrete5, was another plus. My only concern at this point is layout flexibility while maintaining CMS editing. I've read some issues in the forums about e.g. 3 column layouts needing to be handled manually since the CMS is somewhat rigid in its content arrangement logic. Not sure about the details though.

- Oshyan

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