Anybody know of a CMS with customizable input fields?

Needs to be flexible to enter data for more than just stories, etc

[quixote]

Hey WebmasterWorld gurus!

This has got to be a common situation. What do you do when you need to build a site with lots of differnt "editable" parts besides just Title, Subhead and Article, etc?

I want to build a CMS-based site so the client can edit, but it needs more flexibility than what I find with Drupal, Joomla and others. For example, a typical page would need editable areas for Location, Hours of operation, staff at a location, etc, in addition to basic title, content areas. Lots of areas that need their own formatting outside of the main body.

The reason I need this is because there will be a lot of standard info areas across the site with their contents specific to each page. Follow me so far?

I know there's an answer some web pro out there has found since many CMS-based sites seem to feature this. Do I need to roll my own? Would rather go off-the-shelf and be able to re-use for future projects.

All input is greatly welcome!

[bunltd]

Have you looked at CMSMadeSimple? There is a cataloger plugin that will let you have custom fields, and each category has it's own page. The catalog/category pages list the items, which link to individual pages where you can have a title, article area, and whatever additional fields you required. It's pretty flexible.

LisaB

[quixote]

Thanks for the suggestion LisaB, I just now downloaded CMSMadeSimple and the cataloger module and will tinker around with it.

In the meanwhile, I'm still open to other leads. I'm also looking at Expression Engine which does what I want. Anyone have good/bad experience with this, especially when it comes to client ease of use?

Gracias! quixote

[jtara]

ALL of the major CMSs should be able to do this. Don't look for this functionality in the base feature set, though - look at the plugins/extensions.

I think you will find several different ways of doing this for each CMS.

[quixote]

That makes a lot of sense, jtara. You cleared up a big misconception of mine (and maybe others) about CMS. I have found that with a little digging there are suitable modules for most of the better ones out there. Now the choice is just down to ease of use and templating.

Thanks for the edification, guys! :)

[RicoFlan]

Drupal can give you a lot of power in this arena. You can extend it to include the ability to build custom input fields according to content types -- and to define new content types as well.

[BillyS]

I was thinking the same thing - you don't want to look at core with Joomla - you need to look through extensions.

[quixote]

Thanks everybody for your input!

Since my original post, I started playing around with Drupal and have already developed a client's site based on it. I found plenty of modules that gave me the extra features I wanted. In my experience it was easy to template for, although some of Drupal's jargon (nodes? taxonomy?) seems needlessly obtuse.

I plan to build a second site with it, if all goes well I may have found a workable site dev platform!