What CMS?

Throughout my website development for new clients, more and more are asking for a CMS solution of sorts which will allow them to update the content to the webpages themselves. Fair enough in my opinion, it works in two ways - firstly my clients get to update their website free of charge without having to pay me; and secondly it means I don't have to get bombard every two weeks to do the tedious work of updating sentences throughout their pages.

So, I started looking for a simple solution to get things rolling. The lastest website I built was for a new start-up company Ekland - Solar Panel Specialists in Devon which required a CMS solution. Here's what I found:

Cushy CMS www.cushycms.com/
A clean, intuitive, and friendly website that allows you to update your website effortlessly using their online app. Just add their class name to the div's or sections you want to be editable and bingo! edit away. Only slight concern I had with this website was that you had to store your FTP details with them for your users to be able to come back later and update the content - something that I didn't feel comfortable in doing unfortunately - especially as it says that any hacking of user information to obtain the FTP details is not their fault.....

KompoZer www.kompozer.net/
Played around with this for about an hour and found this to be a really good bit of kit. Ok, looking a little dated now that we're all on Windows 7, but the functionality is there. Download the application, connect to your FTP and you're away. You can easily open the HTML files in a visual editor which makes it very easy to see what you're editing. Plus there is a HTML view; which I feel will become useful if I ever have to debug what a client has done wrong.

Joomla
And finally, Joomla! It's an obvious solution these days - lots of templates out there and apparently easy to edit/update. By modularising the components (header/footer) you only have to change the module itself for the changes to be reflected across all pages of your website. In my latest project I unfortunately didn't have time to sit down and learn how Joomla works, but for my next project I will certainly be doing so.

In summary, for a simple WYSIWYG editor that you can trust (he says shly) I'd use KompoZer; but moving forward - if you can spare the time to learn how Joomla works it's going to pay dividends. I've created my own custom CMS packages for clients before in .NET - never again I feel!!