Completely new to CMS... please suggest whats best for me

CMS & WordPress
1

I usually build my sites by hand with CSS structure…

I would like a CMS that allows our customer to change textual content easily, but I also want something that is VERY flexible as far as editing the CSS to make the layout appear and I would like. Also allow for jquery functions.

Jooomla my best bet? I messed with Drupal but not a big fan of it. I would prefer open source.

thanks!

2

I’m far away of being an expert but I can speak of my personal experience.

I find hard to suggest one. Joomla is a mess but it is a well known mess. I mean that it is a great CMS and it is stable but it has become complicated and hard to use (from my personal point of view) although it is quite well documented and with a bit of effort you can get the hang of it.

Joomla has also another advantage: wide community and huge variety of plug-ins (and that always helps)

Be2Evolution is a light CMS but I found that it didn’t work for me.

WordPress, a blog system that right now you could say is a CMS, is what I use the most… it is lighter than Joomla and easier to manipulate and has lots of plugins too

3

I also use wordpress for a blog, but can it be set up to look like a regular website as well?

Are you able to edit the HTML directly? I purchased the edit CSS option so i can change that stuff, but what about the HTML?

4

It is possible to go with Joomla. But I would go with Wordpress personally. Yes, you can use Wordpress as a non-blog “regular” website. Just add pages instead of posts. And set homepage to a “static page”.

Both will let you edit the HTML directly via their content editors. Wordpress editor is better. The default tiny mce editor in Joomla adds in extra attributes into my HTML tags sometimes.

Wordpress is easier to “skin”. You can certainly theme it with your own CSS code.

Some comparison articles …
Which CMS is Best
Wordpress vs Joomla vs Drupal

I would skip Drupal on the account that it requires too much thinking to learn it.

5

awesome thanks so much artcoder… That first article is exactly what I was looking for

6

I’ll prefer to use wordpress if you have a very basic website with kind of static contents. If your site will be a kind of portal with utilities and plugins then I will prefer to go for Joomla.

7

I would say ModX fits your requirements of flexible CSS / Layouts best out of open source CMS.