Content Management

Hi all,
I've got a sales rep who's gotten me involved with a client that wants a Content driven website. I've got limited website development time (mostly good old fashioned static html). I've looked into Joomla and Mambo. Are they any good?

They want quite a bit of stuff on the site including:

videos with sound
calendars
individual pages for tenants
request for resources (based on date, time and availability)
rss feeds
news
etc, etc.....

They also want the administration of the site, i.e. changing news items, rss feeds.

Any suggestions??

Thanks in advance!!

Dartcoach

Sorry, I meant to say they want the administation to be simple enought for an adminstrative type person to make the changes.

Thanks.

I don't know much about Mambo, having never used it myself. However, I would personally recommend against using Joomla!, as I've had many problems with it in the past (mostly, it seems to be rather buggy and caused a lot of issues with permissions - often setting permissions on files so that they could be edited by "nobody" - including me and even Joomla! itself), and didn't find it all that user friendly. In addition, it produces code heavily laden with tables.

I would recommend that you pop over to OpenSourceCMS - a site that lets you test out various popular content management systems (including Mambo, Joomla!, PHP-Nuke, Drupal, Textpattern, and many others) without having to install them on your own server, so you can get a feel for a few different CMSs and decide which one(s) you like (and, of course, you think you're client will like).

It may even be worth your while to get together with the sales rep and your client so that they can try out a few different systems themselves (though you may want to narrow it down to two or three you feel comfortable working with first) - that way you'll know they'll be happy with it.

Also: keep in mind that while not all CMSs will necessarily be able to meet all of your needs out of the box, a little tweaking can do wonders.

Hope that helps!