Free CMS?

Take a look at either Joomla or Drupal...

You might also take a look at OpenSourceCMS. They have several of the popular free/open source CMS's up for you to experiment with and try out, live online.

Mambo is another option.

I'd strongly recommend Drupal it's an excellently written peice of software.

Drupal is basic to start with (you can create basic pages and articles), then as you need to add functionality just use one of the modules available.

We've built our new content site on Drupal. Have a look.

Is it just me, or is Chris asking for something way simpler than Drupal? It is very powerful, and it could work for what he needs, but I don't think it qualifies as "quite basic" and suitable for customers to use themselves.

Chris - how were you thinking this would work? Would it be something installed on their sites or to build their sites in? Wordpress might work for a simple site. It can manage pages and a blog, and it's super-easy to use. It's not meant to be a full-fledged CMS like drupal, but the trade-off is that it's easier to use and any noob can use it to update content. Editing design templates is more complicated though.

This reminds me of a diagram I saw on Creating Passionate Users awhile ago:

It sounds to me like you're looking for something around the iMovie/Basecamp stage - easy to use, smaller amount of functionality but very easy to use. Anyone can get results with little effort. Drupal is higher up in that green area - like around Ruby on Rails/Action Script. The payoffs are greater but you need to invest some time to learn the system. You would also have to do more set-up to get it to work right for them.

mmmmm...Megan, this was a GREAT post for me to read. I have a client that wants something quick and really simple. I never thought of using wordpress or drupal. Either, I think, would be great! Thanks for the idea!

drupal wrote: Is it just me, or is Chris asking for something way simpler than Drupal? It is very powerful, and it could work for what he needs, but I don't think it qualifies as "quite basic" and suitable for customers to use themselves.

Well, the power of Drupal is its modularity. Our installation is only insanely complicated because we use 14 custom modules to make it work. The point is that everything but the core modules can be switched off, leaving the user with something basic (click create content, then click page). This is the joy of Drupal: it's like software Lego.

You're spot-on about Wordpress though, it may well be better suited to the task than Drupal. It might be because I'm familiar with Drupal that I find it so easy, although if ChrisL were to stick to the basics it shouldn't present much of a learning curve.

I was also thinking about the experience a noob would have when trying to edit a page in drupal. It's fine if you just want to do simple text changes but after that you need to know HTML. Or maybe there's a WYSIWYG plugin for it? That would be helpful. The post edit page is quite complicated compared to Wordpress. And you also had to do quite a bit of wrestling with the templates to get the design right. Wordpress is much simpler in comparison. The client wouldn't have to do that, of course, but Chris would have to do it for them.

megan wrote: It's fine if you just want to do simple text changes but after that you need to know HTML. Or maybe there's a WYSIWYG plugin for it? That would be helpful.

Aaahhh, that makes sense. There is a WYSIWYG editor for Drupal (several I think), but it would have to be installed when that functionality is already available 'out of the box' for Wordpress.

Probably the best thing to do in this case is test them both out and see which is best. Drupal vs. Wordpress.

Joomla is great but it gets complicated pretty quick...also you can not add any static content which gets annoying.

I installed joomla and tried using it for a while. Actually the SEO benefits looked pretty good and got some pages indexed. The problem comes when you want to start adding in scripts and anything other than plain hmtl text to your posts.

Then Joomla gets restrictive and annoying. Also creating Joomla tempaltes is very expensive (to hire someone) and very very technical if you want to do it yourself.

Wordpress maybe a better choice in terms of ease and flexibility.

Personally I think I prefer plain old HTML websites. If you want to let people add stuff maybe create a folder for them with different positions and tell them how to do it?

any asp.net based cms that is free to modify?

Wordpress is quite powerful once you get the hang of it. There are many plugins available that allow you to do CMS type features.

website baker is nice and simple....im using it and easy to create template!!

I found the above very interesting as I was about to post a similar question, I have clients who are quite nervous when it comes to computers let alone anything a scary as the internet. I have used dare I say it macromedias contribute and most clients can get along with this quite well, is there anything similar but perhaps open source that I could put them onto?

I am a newbie at putting my own sites together. I though I had made a great discovery when I found DotNetNuke. Enthusiastic user community, modular format, easy to use. Until I found it was really slow to load because of the heavy burden of javascript required to support all the options anyone could ever want. It is all modifiable but to steep a learning curve for a newbie. I think it would be good for professionals who gained experience with it. They could then set it up for easy use by their clients.
Mark
allthewikis.com