Easiest CMS from the USER perspective?

[laurakr]

I want to build sites for my clients that they can update themselves so I’ve been looking at joomla, drupal, etc. What CMS do you think is easiest to change/update from the client perspective? My clients are not tech-savvy in any way.

[Sagewing]

You can't get a clear answer unless you have a clearer question. For example:

- I have a client who have a small blog and they were sold a Joomla site. Joomla is overkill for a blog and for a non tech-savvy client, it's not an easy CMS.

- I have a client who isn't tech-savvy but took the time to learn Joomla and has slowly developed a great content site with it. For them, it's perfect.

- I have a client who runs an online store + content site and their developer did it in wordpress because they feel it's the easiest for clients to use. It is easy, but their needs are more complex then wordpress can handle so wordpress has actually turned out to be a huge headache and is therefore not easy.

If you want a cms that fits all your clients, all your clients have to be similar and have similar kinds of sites. Joomla and wordpress are both great CMS's if you use them effectively.

[wwb_99]

The easiest CMS to use is the one purpose-built for the task at hand. I have never seen anyone completely satisfied with any of the popular open-source CMS apps floating around because they all tend to be a bit too one size fits all.

[laurakr]

Good point sagewing. I make mostly very basic brochure sites, the clients would just need to edit text on one page. I'm not a fan of wordpress as a CMS, I hate that you can’t enter HTML as you want it, wordpress edits it.

[Ravedesigns]

If it's just to make simple edits to text, what about using the html editor that comes along with cpanel (assuming you have some control over the hosting your clients use?)

If you don't like word press, how about something like www.editwrx.com ?

Steve

[sparkdigital]

Hi laurakr,

If it's a cms for brochure style websites I would recommend www.websitebaker.org, the cms is ideal for this and has some good add-ons for catalogues / small shop / image gallery etc. Very easy to instal, redesign and train clients.

Hope this helps,

Konrad

[Cifra]

My vote goes to PHP-FUsion. It's far from perfect, but most of my friends find it easy to work with!

[bcdxer]

you can wordpress as cms, which is simple ine

[bluedreamer]

There really isn't an easy answer to this, from my experience clients have all sorts of abilities. Here's what I've found over the years with a few popular scripts in terms of client feedback...

What they like
Wordpress (blog)
Serendipity (blog)
Expressionengine (blog)
Jshop (cart)
Avactis (cart)
LiteCommerce (cart)
X-cart (cart)

What they don't like
Joomla (CMS)
OSCommerce (cart)

[white.wizard]

From my experience the most common issue with CMS is regarding the layout. If you would like to use a new layout created by your designer or one you bought from a template website, you will find that you can't integrate it 100% in a reasonable time.

I started with php-nuke. Then I spent some time with mambo and joomla.
None of these were easy to customize. And if we are talking from a non-technical customer perspective then probably a script written only for his needs will be better.

I worked with Ezine Publisher too. Has a lot of features, large comunity support, decent default layouts but more complex then php-nuke, mambo or joomla.

I gave up on CMS solutions and developed my own framework.

[abuzz]

Joomla, in my opinion, is the best one out the ones I tried out.