I've been tasked with finding an easily installed Content Management System to help set up a bunch of sites. The problem we've had in the past is that the various CMS things we try (stuff like osCommerce or Joomla or whatever) tend to be overcomplicated for our simpleton users. We end up making all the CMS changes ourself because the users can't figure it out.

Can anyone recommend a super duper simple CMS that also offers some of the following:
1) Ability to create arbitrary hierarchy of pages rather than just adding links to some flat list
2) WYSIWYG interface when editing text rather than simple BBS or HTML entry style textarea.
3) Templating/skinning functionality that can make page layouts other than the simple image-here-text-there-and-thats-it layout. You know, text and images integrated together in the page. Perhaps the ability to put a colored feature box in your page that contains an image.
4) DB-free information storage a plus.

I've checked all the examples here under 'LITE' but I'm a bit skeptical of most of them.
http://www.opensourcecms.com/

    I was just thinking that you might consider WordPress, at least for sites that don't need a whole lot of discrete pages. You can use the "add page" admin option to create pages, using the built-in WYSIWYG editor, use the actual blog posts page as a "news" page (possibly disabling comments?), and there are hundreds (thousands?) of themes out there you can use as-is or as the starting point for customization.

      The goal I've been tasked with is to find a CMS that can manage domains served from a dedicated server under our control. The trick is for us to charge the clients $10/month, not word press.

      Thanks for the tip though.

        5 days later
        9 days later

        Yes Joomla or Drupal will probably suite you. You can download addon components for things like credit card/pay pal user subscriptions. Sometimes these components cost money though..

        Oh...DB free storage?

        Good luck 😛

          i saw a CMS that stored everything in txt files... If i Dig it up I'll be sure to post 🙂

            My experience with using flat txt files in replacement of a database is very un-reliable. Why can't you get mysql on your server?

              [man]SQLite[/man] allows for bundling a database into an application without requiring a separate DBMS (which I think is what was being referred to as a "database" in the last few posts). For the most part, however, it's not really intended for large numbers of concurrent connections, but rather for single applications that might have use for a database (Firefox uses it, for example).

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