Hi there.

Over the years I have been creating several websites for local businesses in my area on a part time basis. The numbers have built up and I am constantly being called by the businesses about updating their website etc. I do so, but it really is a pain going through HTML pages and editing them individually.

Basically what I am looking for is something really simple.. e.g. I set up my own template, not a pre made one. I insert the content by using a simple 'PHP include' on the desired PHP page, (the page already has a banner, navigation menu and footer which I already designed myself). I want my clients to be able to login and edit their own pages using a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor, where they can upload and insert their own images, and they are also able to create new pages. I've been searching around google to no avail.

Can anyone point me in the right direction? Money is not a problem as long is it is a reasonable price.

Many thanks in advance,
Jester

Try out Joomla... it's really good right out of the box.

If you like programming your own thing you can also try Drupal.

Cheers,

Pod

Hi

I used Joomla and the learning curve on it is massive for clients that might'nt be to tech savy (in my view) and if I'm right what your looking for it will be way to big, try http://www.lightneasy.org/ beautifully simple.

Regards

grownupstudent

Or do a search on Google for some of the content management directories and you'll find hundreds of option's.

You can go to OpenSourceCMS and try out demos of all the popular CMS scripts.
You'll see the CMS Demo Menu on the left-hand side of their page.

Instead of using php include you can use smarty templates instead. They allow for much more flexibility.

I've also used drupal and find that it is easy to use right out of the box and there are alot of tutorial videos to watch. Customizing it has a bit more of a learning curve.

Thanks for the replies

Basically, all I want is to be able to design my web pages in photoshop, slice them up and code it in CSS which I can do. So here I have a website template with no content, I upload it to my web server. I add like <php include (mycontent/page1.php) to my template and up pops all the content which I added to my content management system previously, and this text displays on my webpage. I dont want anything with navigation menus, all I want is a CMS to create basic pages, with no images, purely text, then include them to my own template. The text should then take on the formatting of my own page.

Every CMS I've come across seems to be forcing me to use a template or something....

an example of what I want is here www.cutephp.com
You can login to cutenews and add news, and to display this news on your site you use php include (shownews.php)

This is basically what I want, but instead of it being news items, just a thing to edit text on a page, with a template I alrweady have made incorporated into it.

Real simple. Mysql.

Just setup a database for them, they log in, choose insert, add a new article or news story hit save. Thats it.

Then you just query the database and have a while loop and print out the newst 5 articles. Very simple for you and relatively simple for them. Mysql is a straight forward system (the basics of it anyways).

You even setup a seperate table to handle images, they add a URL to a picture (upload at imageshack for free so they dont need to use ftp) and then just have a page on the site that show X number of photos.

any guides on how to do that available? I've never worked directly with mysql before, only to setup some databases for software that needed it.

http://www.w3schools.com/php/php_mysql_intro.asp

This site is 50% of the reason I can pretend to know how to code. The other 50% is webmaster-talk. But w3schools is a great website.

If simplicity and control is what your after then i'd forget about Drupal and the like - the learning curve is steep.

As mentioned, your best bet is to connect your site to a database, learn Mysql and set up your own simple CMS.

You just need to be able to INSERT, UPDATE and DELETE and you've got the core of every CMS.

Great tutorial here http://www.php-mysql-tutorial.com/index.php

This is a case where you probably DON'T want an existing CMS product. They're all designed to handle an entire website, not just content. (Ironic for "content management system," eh?)

I needed to do basically the same thing as is sounds like you need years ago. The site was designed, all I needed was a simple form for other staff to enter content through. It's been working painlessly for almost 7 years now. All it has to handle is the text being entered through a simple form, and store it in a database. Then you can use functions in your page script to retrieve/format/display it.

I've taken the original system I came up with way back when and modified it and re-used it many times. When you write it yourself, you get the advantage of knowing it inside and out, so you can very quickly and effectively extend and modify it for different needs in the future.

That's the road I'd take. Write your own. Almost every CMS I've come across tries to take care of EVERYTHING down to page design/layout/formatting/modules/extensions/style sheets/etc.
The closest I've ever seen that might suit your purpose is probably CMS Made Simple - http://www.cmsmadesimple.org/ I haven't used it myself, but I did look at it briefly. It wasn't what I was looking for at the time.