Easy to use Content Management

Soldato
Joined
4 Mar 2003
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Hi all,
A friend and also a family member want to "tip-toe" into the world of websites.
Coding their own sites is out of the question and even the Expression Web and other such applications would probably prove to be a little complicated.

Looking through their hosting they have access to the "Softaculous" installers, giving such options as:

Zikula
Joomla
Geeklog
Drupal
Mambo
PHP-Nuke
SilverStripe
Website Baker
Pligg
MODx
Xoops
Typo3
Concrete5
Zazavi

And a few others.
These guys want to create personal websites, things that interest them, you know a "general site".
Can anyone recommend any of the above for their "easy to use" or pretty low learning curve?
Not having used any of them myself I'm a little stuck as to which to recommend.

Thanks.
 
No wordpress? Shocker.

Of those I'd go for Joomla or Drupal. They're the most widely used, so in theory would have the best support and plugins.
 
Oh Wordpress is also on there :)
I didn't list that as it comes under "Blogs" and I don't think they really wanted a Blog layout.

Wordpress
b2evolution
Lift Type
Dotclear
Textpattern
Nucleus
Serendipity
Open Blog
eggBlog
Pixie

Is it easy to customise Wordpress into a "non-blog" kind of site?
 
+1 for Wordpress...can do whatever you want now it's up to 3.2.1. It's very well supported, thousands of themes to make it look like you want. Hundreds of plug-ins to customise it.
 
I would use mostly Wordpress for smaller, easier sites. It's easy to setup and the backend is a breeze. I find it a bit inflexible .. have to dip into the PHP code quite a lot but that's OK.

We use MODx for heavy duty websties because Wordpress .. well it's a bit slow sometimes .. and MODx tends to fly. Have to code a lot of things rather than plugins .. but that's where the speed comes in. Because MODx has templates and template variables you don't need to physically access the php files. So there's a stack of flexibility if you know how to use it ... needs some writing though.
 
Wordpress.

It's one of the simpler ones, and it's widely used, so google will help you.
 
Thank you all for your suggestions.
I'll give Wordpress a go and see how friends/relatives get on with it.
 
it's probably the best supported and pretty easy to live with....I expect the "what Wordpress plugins" thread to start soon...
 
Wordpress is probably easiest for a complete beginner. Saying that, Drupal is massively extensible through plugins as well (i.e. you don't have to code if you don't want to) but would take a bit longer to learn and customise appropriately.
 
+1 for Concrete5.
I use it for most CMS based jobs (unless a e-Commerce system is needed).

Creating a 'template' to work from only takes a few minutes and can really save you time.
If you're not much of a designer, there are loads of free & paid themes available from the marketplace.
 
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