CMS For School Website

NetHosted Customer Joined: 05 May 2005 Posts: 149

I've been asked to do a website for a local primary school. I need to build it with some sort of Content Management System so that the staff can update it quickly and easily as they won't have much time available for working on it.

I've had a look at some of the software that I can install using Fantastico. My favourite so far is WordPress, because it seems the easiest to get the hang of. The trouble is the school's site will not really suited to this kind of blogging software. A default WordPress site is centered around "Posts" which appear on the home page and are then stored in the archive. "Pages" are listed in the sidebar and seem like just an addon/afterthought.

Ideally, in the school's website, the 'Pages' should take centre stage and the posts should be in a seperate news section.

So, does anyone have experience of creating a site like this in WordPress?

Or does anyone have a suggestion for a CMS that will do what I want - as I said it needs to be relatively simple and I would also prefer it to generate valid xhtml & css.

Many thanks for any help you can offer.

Richard

NetHosted Staff Joined: 22 Mar 2004 Posts: 5684

I'm not an expert on CMS's but have you taken a look at e107.org it seems to be very popular!

Andrew

Posted: Fri May 20, 2005 6:20 pm Post subject:

I haven't used a CMS as I prefer to write my own pages but popular ones are e107 and mambo. Never used wordpress either. Sorry.

Ian

NetHosted Customer Joined: 05 May 2005 Posts: 149

Thanks for the input. I'll have a look at those.

I too like to write my own pages, but here that's not really an option unless I write my own CMS, which I'm not that confident I could manage properly.

-Richard

NetHosted Customer Joined: 05 May 2005 Posts: 149

Well, I've tried e107 and Mambo. They're both great, but they're way too 'feature packed' for what I want. They're more suited to portal type sites.

Looks like I'll either have to attemp to hack WordPress to bits or keep looking.

Richard

NetHosted Staff Joined: 21 Dec 2004 Posts: 217

Take a peek at drupal too (drupal.org)

NetHosted Customer Joined: 05 May 2005 Posts: 149

Thanks. I've settled on WordPress - there are so many plugins available to make it do what I want. Someone has actually done a good job of turning it into a CMS rather than a Blog:

Semiologic theme and CMS for WordPress

I wasn't too keen on his theme though, so I just used some of his (and others') plugins instead.

Thanks for all your input

Richard

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