[SGVLUG] Questions about CMS's

[Rae Yip]

The problem with CMSes is the level of time investment to learn the
intricacies of any particular one is such that it's costly learn more
than one or two to the same depth.

I haven't been on any project that really required more than straight
HTML plus some dynamic bits in perl, php, or python, plus version
control. But most of those were webapps rather than content-heavy
sites, and edited by coders.

Wordpress, while popular (and visually clean), is notorious for
security issues. Also I think Wordpress and MT fall more into the blog
software category than true CMS, though I suppose some will disagree.

-Rae.

On Fri, Mar 4, 2011 at 10:36 AM, Tom Emerson <starman9x at gmail.com> wrote:
> I've recently been asked to update a website that looks to be "mostly
> hand coded..."  I'm sure whoever built it originally used some sort of
> design tool, but there are some oddities about the site - at one
> point, it looks like any references to "news" were globally massacred
> and turned into a link, even in the word "newspaper"...
>
> I'd like to use a proper CMS tool to maintain it going forward, even
> though the site is 99% static.  The hosting company they use has
> "wordpress" available, which appears to be very similar to movable
> type, and thats my first question: what are the differences between
> these two? (I've used MT for my own site, but I don't update it very
> often)
>
> I would also consider joomla since I use that a bit more regularly ;)
>
> (and I know folks in the background are chanting "dru-pal, dru-pal, dru-PAL"...)
>
> the main purpose of the site is to promote the products the company
> sells (they are a distributor), so the text for the products comes
> from a parent site (that does not use RSS).  I'd like to make it easy
> to update the text content without having to worry about layout,
> links, and making "global" changes with unusual side effects...
>
> So, what would you suggest?  keep in mind I intend to use the current
> site as a template, so the ability to import and update an existing
> page layout is a plus.  The products they distribute are not updated
> very often (maybe two years between updates?  yes, a very niche market
> where the software doesn't need very many new "bells and whistles" to
> keep up sales)
>