My sister has a simple website created in Expression Web, and I was thinking it'd be a good idea to convert it to use a CMS. One reason is that she had a really hard time updating it last time she tried, and a CMS should make updating and keeping galleries much simpler. It should also make it easier to connect with clients and potential clients, and will be easier for me to help her if she needs something (plugin, ...).

 

I tried taking a basic CMS installation and making it look even remotely like her site's design, but it was hard. I'm not a web developer or designer (I'm a C++ programmer by profession) and for example when I tried to customise the default Wordpress theme I couldn't even change the text background from white, even though I tried changing colours in the theme's CSS. Wordpress also wanted to crop the header image. Drupal was a lot nicer in that it has extensive theme settings for its default theme for colours, logo and what to show.

 

I know it might not be reasonable to expect to be able to do everything in a GUI way, but it would be nice if I could recreate the menu style she has, that kind of thing. I imagine she'll be willing to change the design if there are limitations (assuming she agrees that a CMS will be helpful), and I know she'll be willing to put an effort into learning a system -- but not if it's done via programming.

 

So if there are such content management systems, I'd appreciate some references. Thanks!

Might be worth checking out Joomla... as thats fairly flexible

 

You can also create template designs quickly and easily using a program called Artisteer

 

They have just released a new version... and a beta version 3 is now available too. This is compatible with the latest versions of WordPress and Joomla.

 

Hope that helps

Thanks for the Mention of Artisteer. It's compatible with a lot of stuff, but only in the more expensive version.

 

I did some more digging, and I now have quite a few things to test. What I wanted was really a theme/template generator or a highly customisable theme. Looks like there are quite a few generators, from this simple Wordpress Theme Generator, through various editors for Joomla, Wordpress and Drupal, some commercial but with a free version which may be enough (haven't tried yet). See here, here and here. Drupal has the highly editable Fusion theme, and a theme generator module which can create a theme from an HTML mockup. Haven't tried any of these yet except the simple Wordpress one (which is pretty limited but still gave me more than anything I tried before) but they sound promising.

You could try SilverStripe it's a very powerful cms and surprisingly easy to template.

Hi,

 

Here is a simple CMS where you can update templates in a single file.

 

free CMS script

 

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