Looking for a free CMS

CMS & WordPress
1

Hi all I am looking a good free CMS to use with simple site design in php and plain html Anybody got any suggestion (I know I am asking a lot)
Many thanks

2

Wordpress? Joomla?
It depends on what you need.
Take a look here, there are many to choose from: http://php.opensourcecms.com/

3

Thanks Guido I have tried Wordpress but am struggling to publish pages that show on my site

4

Well since you want to have a CMS and involve some html design, I would suggest you try Drupal. I do find it easier to set up and maintain than Joomla but that’s just my opinion. It has historically been more complex than WP but the latest release D7 changes all of that. I now use Drupal for every site I build except for extremely simple static brochure type sites.

Drupal development can be as simple or complex as you need it to be. There are three areas in Drupal development and you can mix and match them to achieve your goals.

1) Configuration - This involves installing, setting up membership levels, roles, permissions, installing/configuring modules, creating content types etc…

2) Theming - The process of applying your design to the site. It can be simple or complex depending on your end goals. A simple but powerful theme can be as simple as 3 files and associated graphic/JavaScript files; page.tpl.php, style.css, theme-name.info More advanced themes use a file called template.php to access the theming API and programatically modify various behaviors but you’ll likely be able to skip that for a simple website.

3) Module Development - This is where you get into the plumbing of Drupal’s API by creating modules that work with Drupal’s core to extend or influence the site in ways that it wasn’t initially intended to operate. For your project and most projects, you won’t need to build custom modules because there are tens of thousands of modules already available for pretty much all of your needs.

If you’re looking for a simple site, I would install and configure a plain unthemed version of Drupal to get all of your pages in place and figure out how the content flows. Once you’ve got all the content in place and the navigation is the way you want it, you can apply a theme to it. It will be a bit of a learning process but hopefully a rewarding one.

Handy modules to keep in mind:

  • A navigational module that is quite handy is Nice Menus
  • For WYSIWYG, use the WYSIWYG Module as a wrapper for any of the common interfaces like TinyMCE, CKEditor, etc…

Good luck!

5

cushyCMS is worth a look at.

6

I forgot to touch on your requirement of design in php & plain html so here’s an example of a simple template that will give you an idea of how they are created in Drupal


<?php

/** 
* Add some code here if you want to grab any variables for use later in the page.
* For instance you could set variable for $page_id & $section_class so you can affect the design via a stylesheet.
*/        
?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="<?php print $language->language ?>" lang="<?php print $language->language ?>" dir="<?php print $language->dir ?>">
<head>
<?php print $head ?>
<title><?php print $head_title ?></title>
<?php print $styles ?>
<?php print $scripts ?>
</head>
<body id="<?php print $page_id; ?>" class="<?php print $section_class; ?>">

<div id="logo">
  <a href="/"><img src="<?php print base_path() . path_to_theme(); ?>/images/logo.png" alt="" width="" height="" /></a>
</div>

<?php if ($mainnav): ?>
<div id="navbar"> <?php print $mainnav ?></div>
<?php endif; ?>

<div id="content">
<div id="inner">
  <?php if ($tabs): print '<div id="tabs-wrapper" class="clear-block">'; endif; ?>
  <?php if ($title): print '<h2'. ($tabs ? ' class="with-tabs"' : '') .'>'. $title .'</h2>'; endif; ?>
  <?php if ($tabs): print '<ul class="tabs primary">'. $tabs .'</ul></div>'; endif; ?>
  <?php if ($tabs2): print '<ul class="tabs secondary">'. $tabs2 .'</ul>'; endif; ?>
  <?php if ($show_messages && $messages): print $messages; endif; ?>
  <?php print $help; ?>
  
  <div class="clear-block"> <?php print $content ?></div>
  
  <?php print $feed_icons ?> 
</div>
</div>

<?php print $closure ?>
</body>
</html>