content management [i think] newbie questions?

[bugman]

okay, i might have a web job that will kill my foodstamps for a month

problem is, i hand-code, and the client wants stuff to be updatable from their office

after conferring re the data to be updated, i agree, and it's not the kind of one-line stuff i usually will do in <pre> tags for other clients

so, firstly, is this what is known as content management?

secondly, the names i hear most often are joomla and drupal and ?

anyone use them, anyone like them, anyone know what i need to know going in?

it's a big, official site, not interested in anything too 'bloggy'

thanks for any help, gonna go use the google

[abushcrafter]

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to- ... ml#Content

[sc0ttman]

Yes it sounds like they want a Content Management System (CMS, or WRS if you read the above post!)..

What kind of website or business are they running? Will it be e-commerce? User management?

If it is very specific to their business setup or operations, they will want something original, or 'bespoke' (I hate that word). If not, then using a CMS that already exists would probably be a better solution.

For example, a system that manages customer/employee records in a specific way, based on certain past transactions or interactions would probably need to be custom-made, to fit the business structure in question.

If, however, they need a fairly standard time-keeping calendar thing for their employees to log work times, etc, then there are lodas of those available already.

Have they suggested using any particular technology, such as PHP or SQL or ODBC? Or have they adopted the 'whatever works on our systems will be fine' approach?

All these things are worth considering, as they help you find a suitable solution for your requirements - if one already exists! There are many great, free, versatile and usable blogs, wikis, CMSs, e-commerce scripts, user management scripts, etc available - I'll post some links if you can narrow down the choices.

BTW, (I reckon) Joomla and Drupal both have fairly steep learning curves as CMS packages go, and are very large bits of kit, with lots of features that might never get used. On the plus side there's loads of addons and customisations and active communities (to pick their brains)..