Easiest CMS to install?

Newbie, first time trying out CMS's

[anon123]

I've had a website up for about 5 years now, and have always used WYSIWYG editors and HTML from scratch, but now I think it's finally time to install a CMS.

The problem I'm finding is its very difficult to install alot of these CMS's!

Which might I have the easiest time installing on my own, being I've never done it before, and don't understand them very well?

Are there some CMS's that will install it for you, possibly for a small fee? (and won't mess up your site!)

Is it difficult to incorporate your current site into a CMS, as well as dangers to look out for, so you don't mess your current site up while installing?

[jtara]

Most of them are trivially easy to install if your host has a program such as Installatron available.

Installatron will install or remove most of the popular CMSs (and many other scripts) with the push of a button in your control panel.

[bill]

Many hosts have Fantastico available from their cPanel that will automatically install a number of CMS scripts, among other things.

[ergophobe]

Assuming that you have shared hosting, if your account has Fantastico or Installatron, just get a new domain on your account. Leave the root blank and in subdirs that won't get crawled (your root will get crawled based on Whois info), just start pushing buttons and installing CMS in various subdirs and play with them in a low-consequences environment. Likely one of them will seem to make more sense to you than the others.

>>Is it difficult to incorporate your current site into a CMS

It depends on what you mean by "incorporate" and what's on your site currently. It should be quite easy to modify the templates to look like your current site. For simple text/image pages, you'll likely have to just copy and paste. If you have lots of pages, you could write some sort of script to try to import the page-specific info and update links.

>>as well as dangers to look out for

- Duplicate content. The directory pages, archive pages and the many ways you can access a given page in many CMS can lead to duplicate content problems. You can control this with a robots.txt, judicious use of noindex and other such measures.

- HTTP response codes. Most CMS that I know have finally gotten this sorted out and a page not found sends a correct 404, but sometimes CMS serve up custom "404 pages" that actually return a 200 code.

- server load. If you have tons of traffic and your server is struggling to keep up with the load serving up static pages, you'll need to upgrade in order to handle it. If you're just serving up a couple thousand pageviews per day, any shared hosting account should be able to run most CMS.

There are probably a hunder other things, but I'm getting sleepy!

G'night

[rogerd]

Probably the easiest CMS is WordPress blog software. It's not a powerful CMS, but for managing a few dozen or maybe a few hundred pages in the same format it's super-simple.