Best CMS for a static website?

June 17, 2009 8:37 PM

Best CMS for a static website?

I'm maintaining a small website with about 10 static pages for now and probably more later.

I'd like to find a CMS system that would let me easily change the content of the pages without affecting the template, but it seems like the only CMS's I can find are built around sites with more dynamic content -- blogs, portals and the like*.

So far, I've been handling it with PHP includes, but I'd like to work with something where I don't have to juggle half a dozen different includes for the template just so I can insert a paragraph of content.

Ideally, the CMS I'm looking for will:

a) let me enter the content I want into the specific places I want it on a templated document
b) let me specify where I want the page, i.e. domain.com/page, domain.com/page.html, or domain.com/dir/page.html, etc.

Any ideas?

*If Wordpress et al are the best options that's fine, but I just wanted to explore all my options.

posted by twins named Lugubrious and Salubrious to computers & internet (16 comments total)

(Or alternately, should I just learn how to have the template, header and footer, in one PHP include? Is that possible?)
posted by twins named Lugubrious and Salubrious at 8:45 PM on June 17

I've heard very good things of Expression Engine.
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 8:46 PM on June 17

EE rocks and can do this. The Core version is free and powerful.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 8:50 PM on June 17

I use Wordpress to run a ton of teeny sites that way and it works decently. It's got the "box you can type in" simpleness going on and if you're good at includes you can even open up some of the design to your people editing stuff [if you wanted to] and keep other stuff hidden. I've been able to do some pretty good stuff with a few static pages and some widgets and even some includes in a few places. It's easy to wrap a design around the content and it's popular enough that you can often find tech support if you have problems. Plus, if people decide they want a blog at a later time, or a calendar, or whatever, you can add it on without too much trouble.

I just went to an "open source CMS" workshop sponsored by the New England Library Association. We also looked at Plone (and the library kit called Plinkit) and Joomla and Drupal but for something teeny like a ten page site, you're probably fine with Wordpress. You can see some of the presentations here, including one about using Wordpress as a CMS.
posted by jessamyn at 8:51 PM on June 17 [2 favorites has favorites]

A CMS is overkill for what you want. Install Wordpress, pick a theme and you're good to go.
posted by signal at 10:01 PM on June 17

I have used Movable Type for my main bloggish site for 9 years or so (and still do, out of inertia), but I have become a firm Wordpress convert in the last two years or so.

I put up a new single-serving static website using Wordpress a month or so ago in literally 3 hours, from registering the domain to writing content to choosing and tweaking a template. It's powerful enough to do almost anything, and simple enough to just put something up right away, and the community is extremely active. Anything you can think to do with it, you can find advice and templates and plugins that will let you do it, with a minimum of fuss.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 11:21 PM on June 17

Nthing Wordpress. Wordpress distinguishes "posts" from "pages", the first being organised on a timeline and the second on a hierarchical directory structure (they are called "categories", I think) like the one you want.

If I were to organise a site as you describe, I would use Wordpress, not post timely posts but only pages, and find a theme that ignores the blog aspect of Wordpress.

Finally, though it's not what you asked, I recommend that you don't use ".html" in the urls to your pages. They look nicer, both to humans and to Google, if they are just of the shape "domain.com/category/title". Just look at the url box in Metafilter, and ponder how much you need a ".html" stuck to the end of "Best-CMS-for-a-static-website".
posted by kandinski at 12:44 AM on June 18

nthing Wordpress as well. Get a theme with a bunch of widgets, as it will make it easier to throw items in certain spots. A couple of plugins that will help a bunch are:

Widget Logic
and
Query Posts Widget.

I'll recommend Thematic and Hybrid as two strong theme frameworks worth looking at.
posted by backwards guitar at 4:33 AM on June 18

Wordpress will probably do what you want.

Django with the "flatpages" application will also do what you want (it comes with the default install).

Both are web applications, though, and will have to be updated when there's security flaws, etc. PHP includes of templates are probably more stable, simple, and portable, but as you say they require a little bit more work each time you update.

ALTERNATIVELY you could write a little php script which takes everything after a certain base url, loads the content (your page) from a static directory and then slams that into the set of templates. Wouldn't be too hard.
posted by beerbajay at 4:58 AM on June 18 [1 favorite has favorites]

Wordpress for noobs, Joomla for people who know what they're doing and who might eventually want to expand the features of their site.

Joomla has built in static pages (versus dynamic pages), you can declare your own SEF URL paths (of course, you can in wordpress too, but it's prettier in Joomla), you can edit in-line w/o being in the administrator backend, etc.

I find that the menu creating/page structure is a lot more customizable in Joomla than wordpress, and that by and large the templates are more robust and easy to customize.

That said, wordpress is easier to use.
posted by TomMelee at 5:25 AM on June 18

I didn't mean to call wordpress users noobs. I use wordpress too. I also use Joomla. Different sites, different purposes.
posted by TomMelee at 5:26 AM on June 18

A web designer I know who specializes in static 3-5 page sites (brochure websites) swears by Textpattern
posted by teg4rvn at 6:14 AM on June 18

Nthing wordpress. The sheer volume of themes, plugins, how-to's etc. mean that, although technically it's a blogging platform, you can push it a really long way in different directions before you get to the limits of what you can do. If your pages will be mostly static, check out the plugin Super Cache, which generates static html pages and serves them.
posted by primer_dimer at 8:50 AM on June 18

WordPress is awesome for small static sites, and it's nice when someone says "oh, could we have a 'what's new' page?" and you don't have to put a ton of work into it. I say that particularly as someone who's maintained (a) several small sites with WP and (b) a couple of fairly sizable sites with the template/include thing. It's very easy to make WordPress look like a static site, too.

You're not going to have as fine-grained control over the naming thing in re: directories, but otherwise the slug field is pretty cool for getting nice short URLs. (If you're worried about redirecting old pages, spending a little time becoming acquainted with .htaccess will be a good use of your time.)
posted by epersonae at 2:36 PM on June 18

I meant to add to my reply above that kandinski is right about not using .html - no extension tends to be more future proof, since your next revision might be asp based (.asp extension) or something that doesn't even exist yet - having no extension means the links should remain the same no matter what's running the site.
posted by backwards guitar at 6:53 PM on June 18

Google doesn't seem to have any problem using the .HTML extension.

http://www.google.com/doodle4google/winners_region.html

FWIW I manage my site with static pages / server side includes (I could have done PHP includes just as easily). Posting is just a matter of search/replace on the page to add the includes & editing the index page.

Why do I choose this method? Because I want my blog to outlast my hosting plan, scripting attacks - everything. If my blog is in files on my computer + on the web server, either one could fail & tomorrow I'd be back up and running.

Also wordpress templates annoy me.
posted by MesoFilter at 7:49 AM on June 19