Hi Aron, Welcome to TWF! This

Megan — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 19:57:04 +0000

Hi Aron,

Welcome to TWF! This sounds like a job for Drupal (with multisite) or even Worpdress MU (I don't know as much about that).

To address your points, with Drupal you have one installation on your server (1). It's an easy install with php/mysql. You need to have lock permissions for your mysql user which might be the only hindrance (should be easy to change that though).

There is a simple login screen for users (2), but unlike other CMS platforms, in Drupal you edit directly on the content screen. There are admin pages for administrative things (searching content, administering users, setting permissions etc.), but for editing content you just go to the page you want to edit and use the edit button there. I think this makes more sense than having a separate area for editing content, but some people don't like it.

Several WYSIWYG editors are available (3). FCK Editor is the most popular, although there are new ones popping up all the time.

Not sure about what would be best solution for product lists (4). The Uber Cart module handles eCommerce, including product lists. I think you can install sub-modules depending on what you want to do exactly (I don't have much experience with this myself).

Drupal has very fine grained permissions so you can customize what your users can and can't do (5). Turn off the theme permission and they can't touch the theme. By default they would be able to edit all content on the site, but you could use an additional user access module if you wanted to.

In Drupal you have one root user who has access to everything (6) but you can set up new user groups with full permissions if you want more administrators. I prefer to do it this way and keep the default user generic (so multiple people could access that account if needed).

You can install a module to customize the meta tags (7).

Drupal does take a bit of time to understand, but once you do it's very very powerful. As I have alluded to above, it uses a modular interface. You install and activate only the modules you need. If an individual site needs custom functionality, you can install a module for that site only.

Let us know if you have more questions about Drupal.