Keep It Simple Stupid - CMS's

[mastiffmomma]

I'm a newbie and this is my first posting. I've been developing simple homepages for family and friends for quite sometime. I'm now ready to expand my knowledge and branch into some new areas. Still working with family, I'm currently working on a site for my brother-in-law. I want to give him the ability to update his own content easily. I know I'm probably making this way to complicated, but it seems like all the CMS's that I've seen in my research are either highly expensive or geared more towards blogs. I'm looking for a little advise and possibly some software suggestions to help me out. Most of the sites that I'll be doing will only be 10-15 pages and I'll want to give the user the ability to change text boxes to update a paragraph of info on a page.

Thanks,
mastiffmomma

[JPnyc]

Hmm, that's a tough one. I don't know any free, easy CMS for websites. I've seen companies that had their own, but they paid through the nose for someone to develop em. The WYSIWYG editors are generally what those who don't code use, but even they have a steep learning curve compared to a simple CMS.

[mastiffmomma]

I'm rethinking my needs now. My hosting service provides secured folders. If I provide a secured folder for my user then he/she could update a text file that could then be embedded into a webpage right? I'd have to figure out the embedding part but I would think that wouldn't be to difficult right?

[dera]

textpattern i run a site like that www.mocfcvic.org.au well you just design n it n impliment textpattern into it www.textpattern.com

[JPnyc]

You can use serverside includes to show the contents of a txt file in your webpage, but your host has to support it.

[DaveSW]

You can also use php
http://www.webdevfaqs.com/php.php#include
However the text file would need to include the basic paragraph tags etc, unless it was one long paragraph.

[philaweb]

mastiffmomma,

Seems like you are looking for a CMS like Fundanemt (http://slettes.dk/redirect_to/?url_name=http://www.fundanemt.com/).

[Kaishain]

Well, there are quite a few out there that I know of. If you buy web hosting from certain companies (HostOrbit.com, I think, is one of them), they might provide you with something called Fantastico. Fantastico is a whole suite of web tools ranging from mailing lists to bulletin board systems and CMSs.

I know of a couple, such as Typo3, Siteframe and Xoops. I haven't used them extensively though, so I can't tell you exactly what they're like.

[mastiffmomma]

Thanks everyone. You have given me plenty to research. I'll be looking at all of these over the next few days.

mastiffmomma