Wordpress help, please (was CMS Suggestions?) -- Updated pg 1

SeñorAmor

I'm setting up a website for a couple of friends for a soccer league they manage. They would like to be able to update the site with scores of games, cancellations, schedules and so forth without having to go through me. Rather than reinvent the wheel, I figure it's probably best to use an existing CMS so they can manage their site easily. Unfortunately, I don't have much experience with CMSs so I was hoping to get some insight from those of you who have firsthand knowledge. I've checked with several sites that have demos of the various CMSs but they were all watered-down versions and I couldn't really get a "feel" for each one.

Of utmost importance to me is that the layout needs to be easily altered. I have the design for the site all but done and want to be able to implement it into an existing CMS without it being too much of a pain. I like to think I have a good grasp on web design, so I'm not against editing code as long as it doesn't require me to rewrite the whole damn thing.

Any suggestions would be much appreciated. Thanks in advance.

stigweard

I'm currently making modifications and writing modules and components for a project that uses Joomla for a cms. My feelings about it run hot and cold, but we are doing some pretty complex stuff and writing custom modules and bots for it. It sounds like you just want them to be able to go in and write new content items using a Word like wysiwyg to let them manage their own publishing. Doing something like that is very easy with it. All of the functionality you would need is built in for that kind of work. It is also very modular, and it is fairly simple to write conditional templates that change their shape based on content, provided you know a bare minimum of php and can read the docs. It would more than work for what you want. You'd probably have to go in and disable most of it really, but it is very easy to do.

MKR

Wordpress is pretty solid as a CMS.

Gihgehls

If Joomla is the fork/rename of Mambo than I can totally second Joomla. It can be hard to wrap your head around it at first but it's very flexible.

SeñorAmor

Ok, I tried Wordpress, and while I like it a lot, it seems to butcher HTML. I disabled the pretty-print view, but it keeps adding line breaks and such where I don't have them.

Also, for some odd reason, I can't get any of the pages to display properly in IE or Opera. The header and footer show, but none of the actual page content shows. It works fine in FF. I'm stumped.

MKR

SeñorAmor wrote: »

Ok, I tried Wordpress, and while I like it a lot, it seems to butcher HTML. I disabled the pretty-print view, but it keeps adding line breaks and such where I don't have them.

Also, for some odd reason, I can't get any of the pages to display properly in IE or Opera. The header and footer show, but none of the actual page content shows. It works fine in FF. I'm stumped.

There's an option somewhere to disable line break insertion.

And chances are the IE/Opera issue is the fault of the template. This phrase "crap in, crap out" comes to mind. Wordpress doesn't do anything other than swapping tokens in the template with the text the token represents.

SeñorAmor

Sadly, I could not find the option to disable the line break insertion.

Also, I have tried several themes (including the default) and the pages simply do not load the content in IE or Opera. All the appropriate HTML tags are there, so I know each function is getting called, it just seems that nothing is getting returned in IE or Opera, which is strange because it's all PHP and should have nothing to do with the browser.

In FF, it even validates as proper XHTML Transitional, so it's not an HTML issue.

Lewisham

I've been using TWiki at my workplace as a CMS (I don't care for the collaboration, just that people can easily edit their stuff) and it's been going well. The plugins are pretty powerful.

kevbot

Drupal is an amazing CMS; I'd highly recommend it. It's quite easy to extend and once you get in to the guts you can see that it's incredibly powerful.

When you're just starting out I'd recommend the CCK extension to let you create custom fields for your content types.

http://drupal.org/

IBM did a developerworks series about drupal and other apps:
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/ibm/library/i-osource1/

SeñorAmor

I took a look at Drupal. While nice, it's an absolute bitch to skin.

SeñorAmor

Ok, I cannot figure this out for the life of me.

I want wordpress to allow guests to be able to view page content. As it stands, I can only see page content when I am logged in. Otherwise, I get the header and the footer, but nothing in between. I have traced back every function I can find to allow guests to see content to no avail.

What the hell am I missing? There has *got* to be some way I have page content displayed for everyone.

SeñorAmor

Bump because I changed the topic.

The wordpress forums are pretty much useless. Ugh.