I’m currently developing a website for a school, with the following requirements in terms of a CMS:
Be able to make changes to the main content
Add events (to be shown on a calendar) or news items
Have a gallery
I was initially going to do all of this myself, but after listening to the boagworld podcast I thought hang on, why not use a CMS like Perch? I’ve checked the Perch site and it’s pretty much perfect - you can add events and news items so easily which is fantastic, but you can’t easily place them onto a proper calendar. Likewise there’s no feature to have a web gallery.
Is there anything else I should consider before just doing it all myself? Just think if I could use a CMS it’d be better for me, but also them as it’d probably be a bit more robust and have some nicer features than something I’d produce myself.
Don’t mind spending a bit, but the school are on a super tight budget so I’m not getting a lot for it at all, so anything above £100 and it really wouldn’t be worth me using it
I would certainly have to go for Wordpress, if I were you, the backend is very simple to use, and plug-ins can be found to implement both the calendar and the gallery.
I would go with Drupal and use the content creation kit and views to make my news section and gallery.
If you decide to go the drupal route, I suggest you get the O’Reilly book “Using Drupal”. It covers 9 or 10 hands-on website examples that you can build while going over the info. Chapter 2 covers an example site with a blog which could be re-purposed for news, chapter 6 covers a large news centre with multiple writers and chapter 7 discusses a photo gallery.
* The book also introduces some nifty admin modules like “admin menu” that give you shortcuts to the tool you need within on click.
Or, you can use a bunch of ready made news modules and integrate gallery/gallery2.
Nice one, many thanks guys! Some really cool stuff you can do with Drupal and Wordpress it seems, will have a play around with both and see which I prefer
