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Ask HN: CMS for mostly static brochure-ware style small business websites?

5 points by greyhat ↗ HN
Looking for recommendations for content management systems for mostly static brochure-ware style small business websites that we freelancers are so often asked to do.

Features needed:

* Easy editing by people comfortable in word processors (the client)

* Easy to make use of an HTML template (standard header, content area footer, single CSS file, etc.)

Don't need:

* A blog or news section

* A forum, a guestbook, comments on pages, social media add-ins

* Abstractions for pages, movable content modules, etc

Given enough time and energy I could roll my own, but I'm sure there are packages out there already. I should be able to host Ruby/Rails or PHP apps easily enough.

Thanks!

7 comments

[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 27.7 ms ] thread
bigiain
Wordpress.

It's a startlingly competent CMS these days, and for "easy editing" it probably can't be beat - it's well built from an editors backend perspective, and there's no end of more or less useful tutorials about using it(and nearly everyone knows someone who's used wordpress before).

greyhat
Thanks for responding.

I've tried Wordpress for this purpose in the past, and just took a look at it again, but since I don't need, and in fact don't want a blog or comments, these are just extra complexity that need disabled. In the several minutes I looked, I could not even find a global comments disable option. (Unless this is different for Wordpress.com hosted blogs.)

Also, Wordpress has such a bad reputation for security that I would be hesitant to use it even if it offered the best in page organization and editing. This could just be a consequence of it being the biggest target, but its not something I want to deal with.

bigiain
I hear you, but if your experience is with pre version 3 intallations of Wordpress, I will urge you to try again - they started getting a lotof stuff right in the 2.8-2.9 timeframe, and the version 3+ releases are, as I mentioned, really quite good little CMSes.

Have a look at http://www.tokens.com.au/ for example.

On the security reputation front, yeah, Wordpress does have a somewhat deserved bad rep, but the only times I (or any of our customers) have been bitten, it's been ultra-cheap shared hosting that's laelyt blame (along with Wordpresses php-reliance and it's need for guessable-path world writeable directories in the web root...)

MortenK
www.cushycms.com is pretty usable for that purpose.
4midori
I'm an evangelist for ExpressionEngine. Open-architecture, built on CodeIgniter. Lots of add-ons, many free. Very easy tag-based template language.
shoeless
Take a look at Concrete5. Fantastic, contemporary UI that is very quick on the uptake. Simple templating, built-in search, form builder, extensible, add-on modules, free and for-pay templates, good developer community.

We've worked with Wordpress, Drupal, DNN, and others, but C5 hits the sweet spot and is always our preference.