CMS Rookie, any advice is appreciated

[johnnyblotter]

Hey people,

I'm a CSS/javascript guy and my partner is a flash/multimedia designer. We have been asked to bid on a project where the company wants a content management system in order to add/switch images, edit text, and the like. It's a medium sized company whose site probably gets a few hundred hits a day. In addition, they want to be able to collect emails from users who opt-in.

Questions:1. What are some good choices for a basic system that we can learn quickly, that the client can learn to use quickly, and that will serve the needs described above...

2. Are we biting off too much here? Is there too much learning curve to implementing something like this (ie learning it in a few weeks) or would it make more sense to hire a back-end person?

Any useful information would be greatly appreciated...thanks.

-Jon

[Hob Bramble]

Well, provided you both know your way around HTML and CSS pretty well (which, since you say you're a CSS guy, I'm assuming at least you do), just about any popular CMS should fit your needs. The majority of popular CMSs are very simple to use, and generally well documented. Generally speaking, you'll only need to know any code at all to modify/integrate the CMSs template into your design, and this generally only requires simple CSS/HTML - you normally don't need to know any code at all to actually update the website afterwords, whether you are adding text, images, or whatever else.

Which CMS you should use depends on how you want to set it up and your clients specific needs. I'd recommend checking out CMS Matrix (http://www.cmsmatrix.org/) - which lets you compare up to 10 CMSs at once to get a better idea of which one to use - and OpenSourceCMS (http://www.opensourcecms.com/) - which lets you demos of popular CMSs on their server, so you can test them out without installing them on yours first. Both of those sites should give you a pretty good idea of what you are getting into, and which CMS is right for your project.

So, to your first question, it depends on you and your clients needs and personal preferences, but most of the popular systems out there are fairly simple for you to learn, and a cinch for your client to use. To your second question - a week or two should have you up and running just fine.

If you need an idea of which systems to look into/try out, I'd recommend starting with Drupal (http://drupal.org/), Joomla (http://www.joomla.org/), and PostNuke (http://www.postnuke.com/). It's likely that at least one - if not all - of them will fit your needs.