Hi there,


Does anyone know of a good Content Management plug-in that can be used on custom designed websites?



It really doesn’t have to be anything sophisticated, just a simple news/events page that someone without any HTML skills could use.
I am a work-from-home web designer and make a lot of small-medium sized sites for startup businesses.


One of the biggest questions I’m asked is ‘how do we get our ranking up on the search engines’. The most obvious response is to frequently add relevant content, however small/medium sized businesses do not have the budget to pay a web-designer to constantly update the site.


Therefore what I’m looking for is a very simple script/ plugin that allows a novice user to add content (e.g. blog style) to one of my custom designed websites.


I could write something very basic, but ideally I would like something with a rich HTML interface so the user can make simple formatting changes (e.g. bold, italic) and maybe a bit of functionality such as setting a publish/ expiry date.


I would be most grateful for any recommendations. (p.s. I work in PHP).


Cheers,
Al.

You could try adding a news or blog page to the site using wordpress. I'm currently working on a CMS like what you're describing but its nowhere near usable yet.

yeah a blog page is probably the quickest way of adding CMS with powerful functionality.

However it's time consuming to get the look/feel to match that of the site design - ideally I would like something that is completely seamless!

Hi,
I know what you mean i'm currently building a community site for my local YMCA/YWCA and the brief their previous web designer had put down to train staff how to do basic html, but i thought that was a bit extreme considering it can easly be done in a web interface no html knowledge neccessary hehe, anyway to cut a long story short. I use TinyMCE WYSIWYG Javascript editor and just pass the content as a normal form variable to the database (you could easily store this in a file if its easier though).
http://www.tornadodesigns.co.uk/port...t/glenrothesy/

The above site is where i'm at at the moment with the development but most of the content you see on the main panel of the site is content managed via the database and the site also runs on a themes management system aswell to allow the client to change themes for different occassions (i.e xmas etc..). Please excuse the design it's pretty bad at the minute as it was sort of a quick throw together to get the fundamentals working.

Hope this Helps
Regards,
Martin

If you just want to use it for news posting you could use CuteNews (www.cutephp.com).

You just include a php file where you want news. It sorts it, you can have an archive. Part store and full story link, images, etc.

Pretty nice. It stores everything in a flat file I believe. I used it several years ago.
Check it out.

thanks for the advice guys - I particularly like the took of TinyMCE and will probably start by experimenting with that.

Thanks again,
Al.

if you know a bit of php, you could use some PEAR scripts which are open source from pear.php.net , if you are less experienced you will probably find some other free scripts to do the job.
http://www.creative-web-designer.com

This might be what you are looking for:

http://cmsfromscratch.com/

I havent tried it, but I think I might one of these days.

For most of my clients, I build a simple CMS using TinyMCE.. its really easy to integrate and customize. Its not exactly a cms in itself, but rather a way for site owners to edit content using a WYSIWYG interface. Here is a decent a list of other WYSIWYG editors.

Other than that, I would say a blog would be the best way to go... it would be easy to create your own blog with just bare bones (no design and simple features).. then use could use it on your clients sites and add the design later and extra features for each site. There might even be some bare bones blog scripts out there. Most of the time, small business owners aren't gonna need advanced blogging features... so it only needs the most basic features