Cms 101

What CMS should a beginner experience with?

[fred]

Hi all,

I'm a freelance web guy, and I take really small jobs, usually simple, HTML/CSS sites, with hardly any interaction other then the email. My customers usually have very little changes required to the content once it's up, and if so, it's a little change: I do it, reload the page and it's over.

I've been looking into CMS for a while, out of curiosity, but also as something that I could eventually offer to customers. Every CMS seems to be good for something (meaning more suited for this or that), but I can't seem to find one that is good in everything. "Everything" including ease of use for the web guy (hi!), available documentation, etc...

So far, it seems Joomla fits the bill: I've found plenty of documentation, even a Dummy guide that walks you through the whole process. Is Joomla the best for now? I see a lot of stuff about Drupal, Wordpress, Plone (well, not so much)...

So, bottom line: if you were to give advice to someone about their first CMS, what would it be?

[bill]

The reason that there are so many CMS packages out there is that there is no one perfect CMS. Some do some things better than others. It really depends on what you need. If you were doing portal sites maybe Mambo or Drupal would be good. If you're doing static sites maybe something like MovableType or WP would be good. It's hard to tell from your given requirements.

I'd suggest you go over to openSourceCMS and try out some of the different packages to see which ones best suit your needs.