Hi Everyone!

I work as one of the techs for a large school district, and my boss decided that we should migrate our site over to a CMS system (currently, we use Contribute, which has been only a pain). I've been doing some research, but haven't found one that best suits our needs. I was wondering if anyone could recommend a CMS that met these requirements?

1) Good organizational/menu structure - our current site has between 200 and 300 pages, so we need a CMS that is capible of generating good, easy to navigate menus.

2) Multi-editor support - we'll have a number of people or so editing various pages on the site, so we need a CMS that offers permissions control so that we can determine who gets to edit what page. We don't want someone from the high school editing pages for an elementary school.

3) Cheap, if not free/open source - we're a public school district, we don't have money

If anyone knew a system that met those requirements, I would be most grateful to hear about it. We're not too picky about what language it runs (PHP, ASP.net, Java, etc), as we plan on setting up a new webserver for this site, and we'll just get one that will support the CMS.

Here is a huge list of open source CMSs.

http://php.opensourcecms.com/general/ratings.php

There are a ton of CMSs in there that I've never even heard of such as CMS Made Simple, which seems to be good according to the comments/reviews.
I'd have to suggest looking through that list for something that will work for what you need it to.

User Groups in Joomla 1.5 can give that kind of control.

http://docs.joomla.org/Custom_user_groups

All the schools in our area use Joomla. It works great for them.

Originally Posted by Madman340

Here is a huge list of open source CMSs.

http://php.opensourcecms.com/general/ratings.php

There are a ton of CMSs in there that I've never even heard of such as CMS Made Simple, which seems to be good according to the comments/reviews.
I'd have to suggest looking through that list for something that will work for what you need it to.

I've actually been putting a good deal of research into CMS Made Simple, and set up a test one. It's actually pretty snappy and easy to use, but all the navigation is done with a never-ending series of popup menus. For example, if you hover over "schools" at the top, a menu will appear listing the schools, than if you hover over "high school", a second menu will appear listing staff, guidance, school info, etc. Then if you hover over "school info", a third menu appears listing contact info, location, administration, etc.

That's just way too many menus at a time. What we're thinking might be better is if there's a menu at the top, where if you hover over an item such as "schools", a single menu will appear. Then you click on of the items, and it loads a page (example, click "high school", it will take you to the high school's page), and on that page is a side menu with a list of all the sub pages.

Originally Posted by webwest

All the schools in our area use Joomla. It works great for them.

Do they all use a common installation (all schools share one installation of Joomla, and have their own pages), or is there a seperate installation for each school?