Suggestions for a very easy to edit CMS?

Question

I need advice/suggestions.

At my place of work - we have a large data set. We would like to server the data up as editable html pages. (Its mostly lists of simple text) We would like to add data, change it's order, update text etc...from the editable pages.

It has to have a pretty low bar for usability and WYSIWYG is a must. The folks who will edit are not programmers by a long shot.

We are not sure Wiki will work. It might have to do - but not sure.

Changes have to be tracked and written back into the DB

I am thinking some kind of open source CMS might work? Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal - something that can get us up and running pretty quickly.

I really am open to suggestions - not sure where to begin on this one.

Thanks all

Answer 1

If you don't have someone available right now with expertise with a specific CMS, it will not be quick to set up at all. One good reason is that you'd have to import all of your existing data into whatever form the CMS supports: this is a task for someone who has done it before. On the other hand, if you can pull that off, some of the built in WYSIWYG editors are quite easy to use, with some systems you get versioning and author information for free etc. I'm speaking mostly with the eZ Publish CMS in mind, although it's probably true for other systems.

Answer 2

I would make a simple CMS site that uses the Ajax control toolkit HTML Editor and perform updates to the database on postback.

Here is the link to the Editor example http://www.asp.net/ajax/ajaxcontroltoolkit/Samples/HTMLEditor/HTMLEditor.aspx

Answer 3

CMS Made Simple (http://www.cmsmadesimple.org) is very easy to set up and use. You do need to understand xhtml and javascript for the theme whacking, but once it's set up it has been trouble free. See my http://www.ConvinceProject.com as an example. It is MUCH easier to use than Drupal and appears to be more stable. I've had Drupal crash when installing security updates to modules, for example. It gives you full access to the header metatags, has fully integrated php and smarty tags, seems quite complete.

AFA importing, this is all mysql-based, although it can use others. If you have a web-whacking coder, pages can be 'scraped' and stuffed if it's more than cut and paste will do.

Lots of us can do it, it's not hard.

Answer 4

If I understand you correctly, it seems like you just need a web-based GUI for editing your DB. Honestly it would probably be faster to just roll your own in the language most familiar to you. There are many fine WYSIWYG editors out there that you can wrap around a text field, such as http://ckeditor.com/.

On the the other hand if you're hoping to solve this problem with DB skills and not do any web dev it may indeed be easier to find a simple CMS. ModX and SimpleCMS comes to mind. Joomla, Drupal and WP all come with so many out of the box features you'd have to strip out - look for something that starts fairly simple. Drupal in the right hands could do this, it has tools for importing/exporting to external DBs but the learning curve is pretty steep. Be aware that some CMSes do strange things with entry data...you may have to look for a text field inside a stored array (Drupal) instead of stored as a straight text field.