advice needed on content management systems

i usually hand-code my html, css, php [don't like anything else ]

but a client wants something they can update often, and not the kind of one-line stuff i usually do in <pre>

so i suppose my questions are:

is this what is known as content management?

joomla? drupal? free, popular - anyone have experience with them? easy to learn, easy for end users?

any other systems i might consider?

can't go with anything that looks like a blog as this a very official site

thanks!

 

good on ya, skipper! glad to know i'm barking up the right tree

don't mind coding the "look" or anything else, assuming it's fairly standard, also i think there's plenty of off-the-rack templates out there

it's that end-user thing i worry about, they have emergency additions and notifications and i'd hate to be responsible for someone not knowing about some natural disaster because i was upgrading debian that day

the site i'm killing is entirely contained in a frameset with one frame - with no noframes - as bad of a single "feature" as i may have ever seen

so anything will be an improvement

spending the rest of the day researching this shit, and backing up the to-be-killed site so that when the person who's charging them $100/month to host on godaddy loses her commission, we can replace the thing [she'll just delete without warning as she has in the past]

oh, the fun is positively looming . . .

 

good luck with that, I have had a similar situation where we had to take a site from under the noses of the previous site admins for fear they would delete the whole thing.
The customer was very grateful. It took a lot of work to get the registration details etc all set up and transferred but the hardest part was retrieving the database backend. LOL, luckily we had a bit of (winks) insider info and a lot of luck

 

I HATE WORDPRESS

there i said it

joomla looking so much better, in fact and deed . . .

 

okay, i wound up writing my own, from scratch

tiny bit of php and a text file or two to store data

now am curious about the markup capable form such as i am typing in right now

assuming it's some combination of javascript and ?

trying to find standalone code so i can see what's entailed - not interested in installing vbulletin and digging through quite yet . . .

 

okay, i am embarrassed now

actually, to be fair, i haven't been getting enough sleep lately

but i saw this page yesterday and completely blew it off and forgot about it

if i had a hammer i'd knock myself out and get a good night's sleep . . .

[that would be a "thank you, skip"]

 

so it seems like it's basically javascript makes buttons, buttons cause javascript to add tags to selected [javascript is told what's selected] text, form [which for wysiwyg cannot be standard textarea so is also javascript somehow?] shows results?

once i hit submit and am sending the result back to php-land i'll feel a lot safer :afro:

[building an automobile out of scrap wood]

 

wound up using tinymce, with my custom php/flatfile backend

it works great, but i don't [didn't get the job]

still, the small and fast cms will be nice for others . . .