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I consider the big ones quite bloated for my purposes. I'm not a web dev, I'm an iOS developer. What I need, is a very simple CMS where I can just paste in a template and then make very small adjustments. Often, you pick any of the gazillion CMSes with a version number in the 0.x series. Their biggest selling point is that it's "light-weight", simply because it's not yet mature.

CMS Made Simple however is mature, but still light-weight. It has been existing for years and is in the 2.x series. They waited a looong time before the 2.x series was really, really stable and only recently announced that they'll stop supporting their 1.x series. Very professional.

For those interested it is at 1.7.1 right now http://dev.cmsmadesimple.org/project/files/6#package-1

You know those CSS/JS menus, you roll the pointer over them and the menu drops down automatically? Like the ones on http://cmsmadesimple.org/

They do that by putting a Flash animation at the top of the site now, like at http://www.sonataarctica.info/

Wish I had my mod points right now, as I would give you a +1 Insightful, good sir. You have articulated my whole problem with Joomla. The basic concepts are made needlessly complicated, with terminology that is counter-intuitive.

As others say below, this is only the tip of the iceberg. If you want to do anything beyond the basic functionality described in the GP post, you get into mambots, and that's a whole other system to learn, just to get things done.

If you ask me, the point of a CMS is to make it simple to put up pages that are organized into different sections of the site. Some people see how to do this in Joomla right away, but for me, I didn't get it until I read a book like the one in this /. book review. By that time, I had found the CMS that worked for me--CMSMS.

We've built our company website (Sceneric in CMS Made Simple which we thought had a good balance of Joomla features and functionality with Wordpress usability (i.e. the CEO could use it if need be). In addition, at the time Joomla insisted on a little bit of table layout in the presentation template and we wanted CSS layouts only (has this changed?)

Joomla's admin interface usability is poor in my opinion, though it does score a big win for shopping carts and eCommerce functionality - the modules that do this tend to be fairly easy to use, and include SEO plugins etc.

Same experience here. Joombla and Drupal are great CMS systems, but not something that as a web developer at the end of the project you can hand over to your "non IT" client.

I ended up using "CMS Made Simple". The name is of course absolutely horrific, but the same can be said for MySQL :-) .

For me it provided the right amount of customization options, but on the other end, non-IT folks (like my customer's secretary) are able to add new pages and other content. OK, to "start from scratch" will probably be a too tough call. But in a scenario where once a month a newsletter page has to be put online, CMSMS going along with a simple list of instructions will allow here to do that with very little hand-holding.

YMMV, but for a simple site, I recommend anyone to check this out.

http://www.cmsmadesimple.org/ is the website to get the software, it's very easy to set up and to maintain content. You can also do Form submissions with it, though formtools is another good tool for that. These guys www.parkcorner.com did our design - they're great value (for the UK - hence they charge in Sterling which is probably a problem).

I would build the site on some simple CMS like CMS Made Simple, http://www.cmsmadesimple.org/ Then, I would add a ready-made CSS template from a site like http://www.oswd.org/ Also, you could just suggest to your boss that you buy the design along with the CSS. There are tons of freelance designers on the web with excellent references available. Our company has bought some amazing designs for as little as 200$. Try a site like http://www.elance.com/ for starters.

Drupal's not bad.

Joomla and Mambo are crap.

CMS Made Simple is the best if you want XHTML strict and CSS, but the community is a lot smaller than Drupal (which is a close second in terms of quality). For both of them, the weak point is the modules. Some are well written, some are crap.

I've been looking for something similare, try solucija, or CMS made simple.

However, I'm starting to think a wiki is the best way to go.

CMSMS (CMS Made Simple) http://www.cmsmadesimple.org/ ... is the only CMS I've found which does exactly what I want, without overcluttering the entire admin cp or that requires a year of learning.

Great, simple and flexible. CMS + Smarty + CSS == a win for me!

I've been using CMS Made Simple for a while. It works very well and is very easy to use. My "not at all computer savy" clients love it and it's worked well for me too. Simple installation, simple page creation, simple menus, simple templating... yea, it's just simple. :)

CMS Made Simple does. It's used on my site: Confirmed Here

I'm biased, since I've contributed to the project, but CMS Made Simple http://www.cmsmadesimple.org/ is a straightforward, PHP-based approach that is designed to port "mostly static" sites into content management.

It is actually about managing content, unlike most of the PHP CMSes which are really more designed to be portal systems.

It's fairly lightweight, works with a variety of databases, is localized into a lot of languages, and is GPLed.

I got into this system after reviewing a whole big stack of other so-called CMS products, and either found them to be portal systems that did content management only if you tortured them for a while, or much too complicated and slow for the kind of thing I needed.

That's not to say it's the right solution to all problems! It has weaknesses if you need to have multiple independent protected areas in a site, lacks a lot of the "portal" features like user-facing login and registration, etc.

Anyway, check it out!

Check out http://cmsmadesimple.org/CMS Made Simple. It may be just what you're looking for. It's still quite young, but fairly featureful. BR

1. Document Management
   Checking documents in/out, versioning, etc
2. Portal Management
   Slash, Nukes, etc.
3. Web based Content Management Wikis, Blogs, etc.

• TikiWiki
• Drupal
• CMS Made Simple
• Jaws
• Wordpress
• MediaWiki