CMS - but hand coded pages

[ofnimira]

After many years of hand coding pages, I decided it was time to look at using a CMS to make managing things simple. I had a look at Wordpress and Joomla and Drupal, but I felt that they tended to get in the way rather than helping. What I'm really looking for is something that allows me to hand code the main part of the page, but enables extras, such as allowing readers to enter comments on a page. I'd upload pages to a directory on the server via ftp, but then I'd log into the system and put a description of what I'd just uploaded and it would generate a table of contents which I could include on the pages.

There are lots of other features I'd hope such a system would have - the sort of things that appear in the sidebar of a typical CMS.

Does anything like this exist? (preferably free)

[edited by: ofnimira at 12:43 pm (utc) on Jun 3, 2014]

[Kendo]

If you want a blog style website then you may need to use WordPress or Drupal. For deign there are hundreds of free themes to selct from.

[ergophobe]

Have a look at this thread. Not the exact same, but might give you some ideas.
[webmasterworld.com...]

You might look at ModX - I think it generates pages from a hand-coded template with simple variable substitution. If I'm remembering right, the system injects very little extra code.

[anshul]

I am seeing Bootstrap, it is not exactly a CMS but quite useful to create a nice and responsive website.

[ergophobe]

Bootstrap is a front-end framework. It won't help with the generation of navigation and that sort of thing.

That said, I have created a Bootstrap-driven set of mini-sites that works as follows:

- general page is templated with PHP-driven templates that use Bootstrap
- Editor edits an Excel file that is parsed by PHP
- Excel file is kept in a directory that automatically syncs with test site.
- Editor changes Excel file and verifies on test site
- if it looks good, editor moves Excel file to directory that syncs with live site
- on page request, if the file update flag is set (I forget if this was based on timestamp or hash), regenerate and cache the result, otherwise serve from the cache.

This was for someone who was running a series of mini-conferences and wanted to generate session grids and "intro" pages straight from Excel. Each conference was one tab of the Excel spreadsheet which was how they were tracking the conference anyway.

Each row had a publish/draft status column, so they could have draft sessions that did not appear on the site.

You could try something like that.