CMS Made Simple Forums

Hi,

i have very little knowledge of HTML, CSS, etc. and a friend of mine needs help to replace his really ugly looking flash loaded web page, with something else.

His home page, and please, if it is not ok to post link, remove it, is at www.vipwineclub.com. I'm posting the link, so you can see how horrible the design is, but at the same time, also how simple the requeriments are.

What he needs is very basic, at least for now:

* home page: introuction, with news, etc.
* about page: information about the company
* membership page: information on how to get a membership.
* contact page: page with some form to contact them.
* events/photos page: page where they can post photos, separated by event/whatever.
* products page: some page where they can show products, but not sell them.[/li][/list]

(About the selling of products, the idea is to have customize yahoo e-commerce solution for the products page, or possible a shopify.com one, as i don't want to take care of all the transactions/payments, issues.)

So at first i thought of something like wordpress, but somehow, i don't think it would be that extensible.

So, is cmsmadesimple the right tool? If not, what about Joomla? Xoops, Mambo? Anything else?

The point is that this would be mostly a "corporate" website, that would have very little users insteraction. But It has to be simple enought so that they can fill it with contentc (text, pictures), without the need to ask me.

So, my requeriments are:

1) Simple to customize (at least at the basic level)
2) Easy to update content
3) Option to add images to content
4) Option to define user accesses (like admin and posters)
5) Ready made templates

I know i can try cmsmadesimple first, and reed the documentation, but it is not the same as having used it for some time, so i would love some comments. Thanks.

kwanbis wrote: So, is cmsmadesimple the right tool? If not, what about Joomla? Xoops, Mambo? Anything else?

Think so  ! The other tools are difficult to handle and to big for your use ...

Thanks. I have only heard good things about it.

My only concern is about Templates, as the templates pages has been promised for march *2006*, and still not there. Does that means that there are not that many? *Good* templates link?

Thanks.

There isn't a template repository of any significance that I know of. However, it's rather easy to create your own. You can start with any page design (e.g. http://www.oswd.org/) and turn it into a template without too much difficulty. There's a video tutorial here http://cmsmadesimple.org/uploads/media/ ... colate.htm (no sound??) and info in the wiki as well.

Tim

CMSMS looks really promising ... i'm deciding now between IT, and Wordpress.

I would do some testing on both, and see what feets me better.

I'm sure i'll be back with more questions

My two cents:

Wordpress' main purpose is to work as a blog tool, you can easily find templates but if you need to customize it in any particular area, besides HTML and CSS knowledge you will also need to know some PHP.

CMSMS is really simple if you know some basic HTML and CSS, but if you're really new at both of those you will have a hard time with any content manager.

Well, CMSMS has one major advantage and feature in comparison to all other CMSes, its simple.  Xoops, Joomla, Mambo, and to a lesser extent Drupal.. are all fairly complicated in their installation and in their usage.

The tradeoff with their complexity is they support nearly anything you want to do. CMSMS can as well, but you have to work a little harder for some of the more exotic functionality.

Your friends site is a bit cluttered up and uses flash where much simpler scripting could've been done, so I don't think moving some of that over will be much of a problem with CMSMS.

Since you know very little HTML and CSS, and I'm guessing no javascript or PHP, you're going to have a pretty tough time with this regardless of what CMS you go with as hexdj said.  I suggest taking it slow one thing at a time and asking politely for what you need help with.

Overall I think that CMSMS would get the job done that you're wanting to do, and out of the other CMS's is the simplest choice.

-K