I have only ever used wordpress for content management but i don't think WP can do what i need so what cms will do this? I prefer an open source cms but a commerical one will be looked at if it does exactly what i need without modifiying it.

 

need a CMS for a website i have an idea for. It will be a review site for certain products. I would need to be able to add pages from the admin panel but i would need loads of inputs

e.g.

 

Manufacturer:

screen size:

hard drive size:

operating system:

 

im guessing i would need 20 odd different inputs.

 

amd i want the images i specify to go into a lightbox effect.

 

Which cms wouild allow me to edit the admin panel to do as i need ?

 

thanks

If you're the one maintaining the content (i.e. you're doing the reviews, not getting visitors to review the products), then I would recommend something like MODx. MODx is open source, so free, and you can add in Template Variables (as many as you like) which are like extra fields that you can fill in for each page when you edit the content. You can then use the Ditto snippet to list each review like a news article (i.e. listed in date order). Integration of Lightbox isn't there out-of-the-box, but it's fairly straightforward to put it in. I've used the MaxiGallery snippet to good effect to provide an image gallery with Lightbox display. If you look at www.pago.co.uk (that's a site I did this year) you'll see a lot of their products listed with image galleries and suchlike, and that runs on MODx.

 

If, on the other hand, you're planning on getting your visitors to do the reviewing, I might recommend CMS Made Simple, which is also free. I don't find it quite as easy to use, but it's got some fantastic plugins for managing end user logins and submission of content from visitors. The FormBuilder plugin in awesome once you get the hang of it, and might come in handy for this sort of application.

 

If neither of those solutions is really what you want, you'll need to give us a bit more information on what you're trying to achieve!

modx seems the logical choice then, im going to be doing the content (and others) from an admin panel so needs multiple logins like WP does (editor/admin etc)

 

im totally new to modx, is there a tut to do what you have said ?

There's the official wiki: http://svn.modxcms.com/docs/display/MODx096/Template+Variables . Not the best wiki ever, perhaps, but might get you started. I personally found MODx to be really easy to use, so just playing with it usually answers your questions for you most of the time. When you install MODx it gives you the option of installing sample pages - if you select that option it'll populate it with various pages showing how it all works, from which you can see how templating and snippet calls work. Creating TVs is very straightforward, and using them is just a case of including their name in the page template (see wiki for details on that). And if you get into any difficulty, check out the forums, they answer pretty much everything!

Look at Expressionengine as well as it excels in managing the sort of content you will have. All your custom fields are no problem , plus you get the ability to do nice things like Filtering results.

i been working on learning the themeing behind EE so may go back to it for this. Duhhh only last week (or the week before) that i downloaded it

Ok EE is out of the question at the moment. I need to have a static homepage and then blog on another page (like wordpress does) and this can only do with the EE premium cms'.

 

Any others that i have missed? I might have to look at a custom cm's.

Ok EE is out of the question at the moment. I need to have a static homepage and then blog on another page (like wordpress does) and this can only do with the EE premium cms'.

 

Any others that i have missed? I might have to look at a custom cm's.

 

EE Premium? As in needing to purchase a license? That's not true...

 

The core version is more than capable of a 'static' homepage and a blog.

 

Just sort out the Weblogs accordingly.

Ok EE is out of the question at the moment. I need to have a static homepage and then blog on another page (like wordpress does) and this can only do with the EE premium cms'.

 

Any others that i have missed? I might have to look at a custom cm's.

As Kerry described EE Core is more than capable of managing a blog and as many "static" pages as you want, product catalogies and so on. Don't forget that with any CMS any "static" page is really a dynamic page but made to look like one to the untrained eye

 

EE does have a "Pages" module in the premium versions but you don't need that to make "static" pages, just a normal "weblog". As an example see http://www.jacquitaylor.co.uk/ which was built from EE core - the home/about/contact pages look "static" but they're just "weblog entries".