Need a CMS!?

I've read the posts here which talk about CMSs. I have designed a simple website for an aquaintance and am doing another for a small charity voluntarily. I have reasonable skills in xhtml and CSS but want other novice users to update pages in a simple way. Some feed back on my thoughts below would be appreciated.

I have an idea what a CMS is and know that it sits on the host and controls changes to pages. Is there a site which describes a CMS architecture in simple ways?

I have looked at ROR but it seems you have to learn programming seriously to use this one. Am I right?

I looked at Snippetmaster and think this is not suitable for a small site and did'nt quite get the message about it!

I looked at XOOPs and that did relate quite well as it has a hands on tutorial about changing a page. This looks like a real possibility and I do not need to learn programming, right? I assume this requires templates to be built?

I also looked at the IBM site which assessed various CMSs for their project and they went ahead with DRUPAL. I am going to look at this one now. Anyone other novices out there using this?

I have got and use Studio 8 (education version) and Contribute a bit but Contribute costs over £100 - too expensive and really needs dreamweaver to go alongside. I wonder how this package is integrated with a CMS. Anyone comment?

Try wikipedia. That might help. Good luck.

You might find this site interesting. It has lots of demos for most of the free CMS apps. Basically lets you play with them so you can see and test the different features.

Displeaser

Hi old&nojob,

If you are building sites for clients and want them to update their sites on their own - you can check out SiteKreator and their reseller program. For a very small monthly fee you can use their business designs and build up really nice sites for your clients. Given that you know some html/css, you can further customize the available designs. Or you can put in a totally custom design using the blank design.

The site update happens though a browser only, and is similar to editing Word documents - so your clients will surely be able to edit the site content, add new pages, remove old pages, etc.

Hope that was useful. Good luck!