Do you know any free, easy to integrate and use CMS systems for custom websites?

) August 30th, 2012

I am just making a site for a friend of my father. They require a website for their club, so they looked around and got quoted $1,100.00 bucks for the site to be made.

I told them that seeing as they are friends of family I would do it for them if they throw me $100 or so as a token tanks.

They have told me that they would like to be able to have a CMS system so that they can make changes to the content on their own. This causes a tad of a problem for me.

When a customer wants a CMS, I simply make a CMS system from scratch.

My problem is that, I don’t mind making an HTML, javaScript and Flash 3.0 site for $100, I don’t even mind updating it for him once or twice a year free, but I can’t spend the next 2 or 3 weeks coding a CMS from scratch for just $100.

So, I am looking for a CMS system, that I can just take and integrate in to some existing files that I coded from scratch.

Do you know of any such CMS system?

This is not really my area, I know that Drupal and Joomla and things like that exist, but I have never used any of it as I just like making my own things from scratch.

Ideally it should be free, secured by login, free of spam or nasty catches, and just allow me to edit photos and text. No need for fancy options.

Any ideas?

Thanks.

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6 Answers

You could always go by the old standby – Wordpress.

Otherwise, Drupal is indeed not a bad alternative as well. For a hundred bucks, they’ll be happy with either of those, especially since they’ve got a brand new website to boot.

gambitking (4206

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Another vote for Wordpress. With some basic CSS and HTML skills, you can make a really solid site pretty quickly. This is all that most people need.

tom_g (16638

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In my opinion, it’s a mistake to charge 100 bucks for any CMS. $1,100 is even too low.

That having been said, I’d recommend Wordpress if you haven’t worked with Drupal or Joomla before. Drupal is powerful but probably too robust for what you need. Drupal has a very steep learning curve too.

Wordpress will be the easiest to get up and running – the ux team has done a good job of making the experience intuitive.

Good luck! Let me know if you have other questions.

silverfly (4068

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