I have built a simple site for my local football club. The site has lots of static content but the club officials would like to be able to update some of the content themselves - club news, match results etc.
To achieve this, I think I can either hand-craft some pages (using PHP and MySQL) which they can use to update the content, or I can use a CMS (open source). It needs to be as simple as possible as the people updating the site will have little or no technical skills. Will a full CMS solution be too complicated for what I need? Also, I don’t want to have to rewrite the site using cms templates – is it possible to avoid this?
I would really appreciate any advice on this – the more I investigate online (Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal etc) the more confused I get!
I know the feeling. I spent about a month or so reading books and going through the pro’s and cons of Drupal, Joomla and Wordpress (along with a ton of other content management systems).
All of the above are good when it comes to actually posting articles for the end user. The big problem I found with the above is it seems that you have to slice your design up and shove pieces here and there into the templating system.
The great thing about EE in short? You set up your data fields in the CMS back end. You design the site the way you want. Then you simply insert tags into your pages where you want the dynamic content to appear. The end-user/client can then log in to add/edit/delete content.
I’ve found the free CMS Made Simple (based on PHP/Smarty & MySQL), one of the easiest CMSs to incorporate into an existing design. Once the template is set up, which can largely be your existing HTML, adding an editable area can be as easy as adding the tag {content}. It’s friendly to web standards and CSS based design.
Despite the name, the product is not targeted at beginners but for experienced designers/devs who need a ready made CMS to organise a site and allow clients to manage content. Where support is concerned, I suggest perusing the CMSMS forum to see if you like the tone.
For your purpose I think doing the form yourself is the easiest way, so you don’t have to change much of the site itself and simply provide a field for the club officials to write their updates.
As per my advice you don’t go with full CMS because it’s bit difficult for non techie. It’s better to mange manually and let the club officials to post update by themselves. As per my thinking this is the best way to manage all the things in easiest way.
Another option is to look at CushyCMS. It’s free and relatively easy to implement into an existing static website. You can choose which parts of the site you want to make editable.
For your small site a Wordpress.org installation would be fine. You have lots of plugins and themes to customize it. It’s also user-friendly for your users…
Would you like to re-create a site or add a CMS to the existing site? If you go for the second option I wish you good luck.
If you’d like to start from the sketch WP can be a nice start point.
Anyway I suggest to test several custom CMSs - they might also work
A service like designhamster.com would be a solid option for you. It let’s you add editable blocks to your current HTML. Unlike cushycms, hosting is included.
I’m not a fan of Expression Engine, I find it way too complicated, though some people love it. Wordpress is good for simple sites (and complex ones :)), a few pages, easy to edit. Joomla is super friendly and gives you more options in terms of chucking widgets around, though Wordpress does most of that stuff too now. Drupal is cool and has a lot of credibility but not a particularly friendly community.
On balance, for a small scale CMS I would always choose Wordpress. If you wanted a super easy option, you could even just choose a standard theme and change the colours and masthead graphic.
I’d go with WordPress whenever possible. I haven’t tried Expression Engine yet, but I’ve heard good things. For simple sites, though, WordPress should do everything you need.
I would stick with the least confusing solution, which is the simple template you were thinking of, simply give the folks doing the update an example of how it can be updated, and if they would like more features, then look at Joomla and Wordpress
CMS is great! Try wordpress. It’s simple and easy to use. It’s also search engine friendly. Many cool designs can now be downloaded for free. Good luck!
I’m using WP for my site, and it’s easy to use I am not tchnically savvy, but with WP I can handle everything myself. Well, I don’t do anything special or super complicated and if I need to - can ask someone more skillful.
Here’s a post on whether to use a statics website or a CMS based one.
Good luck!