Best CMS for Content Site w/long (up to 80 page) articles

[mwstrick]

I have a project that I am developing that has large bunches of related content - think ebooks - that I want to publish. I'm trying to find the right CMS to do this. I will want 2 series of navigation. One for the "ebook" content and one for the selection of which "ebook" the user wants. There will be some pictures mixed in on some of the content pages, as well as some advertising either in the sidebar or within the content area.

I've used drupal before and it seemed like a ton of work just to get the layout and menu's I wanted and then I found out to do what I really wanted would take a plug-in that hadn't been updated for the current version (I think it was 6.0 at the time). So no drupal.

Any ideas on what to use. I don't need any fancy html or flash. The homepage will be simple. Would joomla be a good fit?

[ergophobe]

I know you said no drupal, but I would still use it for this particular job. It has a core (not third party) module called "book" so you can be sure it will always be supported in whatever current version there is without the module update headache.

It comes packaged with a "block" that lets you show a sort of table of contents for the current book when someone is on a page of that book. So the layout in terms of getting that to show is pretty straightforward.

It also makes it fairly simple to put Next/Prev navigation at the bottom of the page.

If you set it up so that books automatically get added to a given menu, that should be pretty much automatic too.

For the images, you'll probably want something like img_assist or some other third-party module, which does pose the problem that you mention, though of course you can always put images in by hand (i.e. FTP to a /images dir and then just add an <img> tag).

I've never used it for 80 pages, but I use it a lot for things that spread over 5-10 pages. For 80 pages, you might want a two-level hierarchy so that your TOC isn't overly long.