Cms ?

[Stress Head]

My wife has recently been asked to write a newspaper column for a big paper out here in Spain and like lots of things what started as something small has grown!!

Now, unknown to me she actually writes really well. So along with a friend they are now doing a weekly column on heath, fashion beauty etc.

So, now I have a free content writer on a nice regular basis, what would anyone recommend as the best way to do a site using it?

Obviously the theme will be the writing but I don't know the best way to build it. Ideally I want the ladies to be able to update the content etc themselves.

I have looked at Mambo and such like before but didn't like it much, plus I believe it isn't very search engine friendly. Is it best to build a site how I normally do, then bold on a CMS?

Looking at including a forum for Q&A etc too.

Any thoughts guys and gals?

[Bod]

I took on joomla.org which is freeware and seems to be doing the business for me, only came out in September last year but used the mambo base to start with or something todo with it.

Its got alot of addons like forums etc etc and easy to update.

I changed the village site i run to this and search engines seem to like it better than the html i had as more pages are ranked higher than the html version.

[eskimo]

I too am looking for a really basic cms system for some non-techy clients to use. But so far all the solutions I've looked at are overly complicated. I might just modify some OS blog script as an alternative solution.

[dmorison]

Drupal is worth a look.

http://drupal.org/

[pricethat]

Drupal is the best cms i have ever used, for so many reasons. Some say it doesnt do some things that others do but when you actually know about CMS's and all the different types you will see that the wonderful simplicity of it is just great.

Suggestion to dmorison: Whack a majic parser into it and you got a ready made business too ............ ok i get my coat

[Stress Head]

Thanks guys. I have installed both of the above and at a first glance I prefer Joomla I have to say. However I think I might be swayed by the nice interface :-)

Pricethat, can you please expand on your comments above

Whack a majic parser into it and you got a ready made business too ............ ok i get my coat

[scifind]

Why not just use Blogger? Custom templates - SE friendly URLS - can FTP pages to your server and accepts comments!

[Stress Head]

Hi Scifind. Yeah I did install wordpress originally and quite liked it to be honest. But I kind of wanted more than I could see it offered. Ideally I would like to use product feeds on the site too but I'm not sure how any of the solutions mentioned would work with that.

[BenKowaBunga]

I've recently used www.cmsmadesimple.org to get a website going for my Dad where ease of use and understanding was of the utmost importance......ahhh, bless my old man

[Stress Head]

Thanks everyone for the suggestions. Think I have decided to give Joomla a go for now.

One other question though. I have seen lots of sites that seem to use some kind of script that picks out keywords in the content of an article and makes them links. seochat.com do this a lot.

Does anyone know how this works please?