What CMS should I choose for my clients?

Hi.

I’m a webdesigner and my clients either wanna be able to upload pictures in a picture gallery, or have a news box to write news - Not wordpress if not needed.

Wich CMS would be best and easiest for the client to just upload her own pictures into a Gallery?

Wich CMS would be best and easiest for the client to update news in a news box?

And is there any CMS that can do both of them?

/ Kevin.

There are lots of content management systems out there, depending on your needs or future needs most free cms will be adequate. Have a look at the following

CushyCms
Wordpress
Perch
Joomla
Drupal

You could also look at expression engine, it seems to have great support and seems well renowned, but comes at a price. My personal opinion choose wordpress, free, great support in documentation and plugins and it will do all that you want. Hope this is of some use.

To be honest, I think ill try to learn Wordpress, so I get really good at HTML, CSS , Wordpress.

Wich is the best wordpress guide to learn it for my websites? I have no, I mean, No idea how to use wordpress basically.
Is there any playlist on youtube with tutorials?

Anyone knows?

EDIT: I know how to install it though. lol

Well, this is what I wanna be able to do as easy as possible. Update the text somewhere on the page, have a image gallery for clients to insert their own pictures, a box where clients can update their news, change an image to be a link to somewhere, thats basically it. Wich of the cms can do that (Not wordpress) If noone cms can do that except wordpress then I have no choice…

Hi.

I’m sorry, as you can see I write one second that I don’t want wordpress and the other second that I want.
I finally decided to pick Wordpress because its the worlds most popular CMS, it can basically do anything wich would be good if my clients maybe want something CushyCMS cant do if I choose to go with Cushy wich I DON’T.

So I read http://thethemefoundry.com/blog/html-wordpress/ and it made me say “Aha”.
So thats basically how I can convert my html & CSS page into a Wordpress theme, from here on, where should I go, now when I have seperated my site into the four different sections, header.php, index.php, sidebar.php, footer.php. My client want a image gallery so he can upload pictures himself, thats basically what I wanna learn.

So, does anyone have a good guide for me what to do after this I’ve done?

  • Kevin

Hi Kevin,

Depending on how you want to approach Wordpress will give you different answers. I personally use WordPress almost exclusively to create all my websites. I do this by installing WordPress and then using either a very good theme (which usually comes packed with all sorts of goodies) or by building my website using a blank framework and plugins.

It is possible to use WordPress this way and to still create very customised websites. It free’s you up to concentrate on displaying the information rather than creating a website from scratch.

The other way is to install Wordpress and get your hands dirty in with the code and write customised code from the outset. You’ll certainly learn more along the way, but it will take longer depending on your current coding skills.

Wordpress is a good platform for development because so many people use it and there are so many great resources out there.

For the project you are talking about I would install Wordpress, install a Slider or Gallery plugin, customise the administration menu (to allow your customer to log in and not see all the options), pick a theme and style the website. It isn’t a complex thing. I would stick to the major players for providing themes or plugins because they provide good support forums. You might pay a few dollars here or there but it isn’t expensive to get some fantastic tools. Personally I am a fan of Envato and their [URL=“http://themeforest.net/popular_item/by_category?category=wordpress”]Themeforest and [URL=“http://codecanyon.net/category/plugins/wordpress”]CodeCanyon in particular (just be sure to search for WORDPRESS related plugins, sometimes there are different versions).

Thanks for your answer.

I’m still a little confused how everything works, since the only thing I’m familiar with is HTML and CSS.
I just don’t get whether I should make the whole site in dreamweaver and leave space in dreamweaver (a div tag) for the things I later wanna add from Wordpress, for example, A image gallery.

The thing is that my clients never wanna be able to have a full site that everything’s updateable, mostly a client just wanna be able to have a image gallery to insert their own pictures, or maybe just a news box to write some news.

I just wanna know where to start off now, should I make the site in dreamweaver and leave space for Wordpress plugins (such as a div tag)?


Well REALLY what I wanna be able to do really in the end is to make a site that the clients can update everything, and the design should be exactly as the client describes how he wants and I wanna learn not to use any themes. So where should I go from now?

Hi,

I´ve learned so much with: http://www.lynda.com/WordPress-training-tutorials/330-0.html

They cover the essentials but with a great visual explanation!!!

Good luck

Thanks. Ill check it out.

It really depends on your client and how tech savy are they. Why I say that is WordPress is by far the easiest to use and teaching someone how to change their content. But if they know some basic web development and would like to be able to move things around on their own terms, Drupal is more flexible.

for me wordpress is always great and one thing wordpress is really time saving.Currently we have developed WordPress script for Classifieds
<snip/>

Wordpress is always a safe bet, it is currently by far the most established and popular CMS - I personally use Drupal mostly, or Umbraco if I’m coding in Dotnet. Ideally I suppose the “best” would be to have some knowledge of all the CMS and thereby be able to choose the one that best fits the clients needs. The risk with that is of course, that instead of truly knowing one CMS fully, you risk only “knowing a little about all of them”.

In short, WordPress is a safe bet :slight_smile:

Magento for online e-commerce business, otherwise you can also use like wordpress for blog, Joomla & Drupal for good looking …It depends on you which one you like and how you can use them.