I need som help choosing the right CMS system for my rather simple website. The site I'm creating is a two-fold professional/personal site, which will be updated by me only (most likely). It will be like a blog in some way, but I want to design the site myself with HTML/CSS, and have the functions that a CMS-system gives when it comes to organizing articles, commenting, top 10 viewed and such.

I've been looking at WordPress, Drupal, Movable Type and Seditio, but can't figure out which one that is most easily modified. Ideally I'd like to create my site in DreamWeaver, and implement such a system. Alternatively, I can take a theme and modify it, but I'd reather design the site from scratch myself.

So which system is best for implementing into a website?

In my personal experience, I've found that Joomla is probably the easiest to modify while still being fairly powerful. Wordpress would probably be next (and is easier to use once you have it set up). That said, I'm sufficiently frustrated with all of the options that I've taken to writing my own CMS. If you want to play around with demos for each of those without installing them, OpenSourceCMS.com has live demos that you can access for free.

I like using Apache Sling or Jackrabbit along with Spring but, you're going to need a bit of programming skill. None of those are meant to be an out of the box CMS+Publishing solution like those above.

Joomla is probably the best for what you are looking for. I used it for my first site with a CMS and picked it up quickly. Everything in it is very straight forward and there are a lot of extensions and plugins. The only issue with Joomla is that it doesn't do well for very large sites.

I have to say joomla as well have been using t for about a year now and quite happy with it

I opt for wordpress almost every time in cases where mostly text needs to be modified/edited/added. I have clients making many posts in only minutes of instruction!

It will be a bit difficult to make the site in dreamweaver then transfer it to a wordpress or ANY CMS. Most all have their own templating system where your header will be one file, the footer will be another, followed by sidebar, etc. You have to strip that dreamweaver code down and separate all that by hand.

You'll be fine if you can code by hand or know what dreamweaver is doing to make the page. My best advice would be to "hand-code" these sites from scratch.(As opposed to "designing" them from scratch in dreamweaver if you use WYSIWYG.)

If you learn how the Wordpress loop works, you can integrate it pretty well into any site.

Try these series of videos to see if you're up for it:
http://css-tricks.com/video-screenca...ress-part-one/

Thanks for replying, all of you!

I'll definitely check out those videos in that link. So, are you saying it's really hard to create a site in DreamWeaver and implement any CMS? I was thinking that it shouldn't be that hard to create divs with a code that gets the info from the CMS; ex. main content getting recent articles, a div on the side with 10 most popular etc. Or maybe it's not that easy?

I do know a fair amount of HTML/CSS. I don't code the site in Notepad, but do not rely on the WYSIWYG either.

That is kind of what you do. In your hard-coded html where you may have a div display a paragraph of text, you would substitute <?php the_content('read more...'); ?> which basically puts the text from the current post in the loop into that spot. You just need to understand the Wordpress loop http://codex.wordpress.org/The_Loop

a div on the side with 10 most popular etc

Yes, you can display categories however you like by title, most popular, etc. You'll just have to google some wordpress hacks and you'll find out how to display information any way you want. Like here: http://vandelaydesign.com/blog/wordp...ategory-hacks/

Looks a bit much at first, but once you get it, its fairly easy.