
Ask HN: CMS for mostly static brochure-ware style small business websites?  - greyhat
Looking for recommendations for content management systems for mostly static brochure-ware style small business websites that we freelancers are so often asked to do.<p>Features needed:<p>* Easy editing by people comfortable in word processors (the client)<p>* Easy to make use of an HTML template (standard header, content area footer, single CSS file, etc.)<p>Don't need:<p>* A blog or news section<p>* A forum, a guestbook, comments on pages, social media add-ins<p>* Abstractions for pages, movable content modules, etc<p>Given enough time and energy I could roll my own, but I'm sure there are packages out there already. I should be able to host Ruby/Rails or PHP apps easily enough.<p>Thanks!
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bigiain
Wordpress.

It's a startlingly competent CMS these days, and for "easy editing" it
probably can't be beat - it's well built from an editors backend perspective,
and there's no end of more or less useful tutorials about using it(and nearly
everyone knows someone who's used wordpress before).

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greyhat
Thanks for responding.

I've tried Wordpress for this purpose in the past, and just took a look at it
again, but since I don't need, and in fact don't want a blog or comments,
these are just extra complexity that need disabled. In the several minutes I
looked, I could not even find a global comments disable option. (Unless this
is different for Wordpress.com hosted blogs.)

Also, Wordpress has such a bad reputation for security that I would be
hesitant to use it even if it offered the best in page organization and
editing. This could just be a consequence of it being the biggest target, but
its not something I want to deal with.

~~~
bigiain
I hear you, but if your experience is with pre version 3 intallations of
Wordpress, I will urge you to try again - they started getting a lotof stuff
right in the 2.8-2.9 timeframe, and the version 3+ releases are, as I
mentioned, really quite good little CMSes.

Have a look at <http://www.tokens.com.au/> for example.

On the security reputation front, yeah, Wordpress does have a somewhat
deserved bad rep, but the only times I (or any of our customers) have been
bitten, it's been ultra-cheap shared hosting that's laelyt blame (along with
Wordpresses php-reliance and it's need for guessable-path world writeable
directories in the web root...)

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shoeless
Take a look at Concrete5. Fantastic, contemporary UI that is very quick on the
uptake. Simple templating, built-in search, form builder, extensible, add-on
modules, free and for-pay templates, good developer community.

We've worked with Wordpress, Drupal, DNN, and others, but C5 hits the sweet
spot and is always our preference.

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4midori
I'm an evangelist for ExpressionEngine. Open-architecture, built on
CodeIgniter. Lots of add-ons, many free. Very easy tag-based template
language.

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gadders
I quite like: <http://www.couchcms.com/> as well. Not used it in anger yet,
but planning to.

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MortenK
www.cushycms.com is pretty usable for that purpose.

