The logo, background image, header, footer, images and content for my site are all ready to go. I thought I should be able to whip that site up in less than ten hours. I thought (naively) that any CMS would do. Surprisingly, this simple site actually is a non-trivial effort in many CMSs that I have tried. By non-trivial, I mean that it required me to grasp the full structure of the themes (or templates) with no easy way to edit the layout. That includes (Drupal, Wordpress, Composr, SilverStripe, ProcessWire, Sitemagic CMS, GRACV, RedaxScript, Quick.cms, OctoberCMS, ImpressCMS, phpwcms, wondercms, BoltCMS, ConcreteCMS and Zenario). Yes, I have tried each and every one of these CMSs and now I'm trying CMS Made simple.
Of all of these (excluding CMS Made Simple), Sitemagic CMS and Zenario comes the closest. Unfortunately, SiteMagic CMS has other shortcomings and Zenario's tech requirements are beyond what a shared server offers and I don't want to go back to managing the full linux stack (been there, done that for ten years).
Here are my requirements:
- I should be able to specify a titled image as a background for all the pages across my site quickly and easily. Oddly, this feature is available in a simple point-and-click fashion in Zenario, Drupal (depending on the theme) and to a lesser extent in ConcreteCMS
2. I should be able to specify the number of blocks on a page and expect that the page would be responsive.
3. I should be able to specify a header and a footer.
4. The contact form should have some form of captcha or ways to prevent spam.
5. I need a relatively simple email module that can send a newsletter to subscribers.
I've read the docs on CMS Made Simple and it seems that in order to modify a template, I've got to learn Smarty templates and do the mods by editing the tpl files and maybe the php files. That strikes me as overkill for what I need. I went down the full list of modules, hoping to find a WYSIWYG module that would allow me to style the template without having to get knee-deep into smarty templates No dice. Does this mean that all the users of CMS Made Simple are Smarty Experts? I mean, I don't think that what I'm asking for is exotic!
Please help me find out if CMS Made Simple meets my requirements. I may be approaching the whole thing the wrong way or with the wrong perspective. Or maybe my 10 hours deal is naive? I don't know.
Thoughts?
