CMS for our website clients

After much reading, Googling and experimenting, I have now found a Content Management System that seems ideal for our website clients. It seems to offer enough features, whilst retaining a very, very inuitive interface. Early testing also suggests that the pages validate, and, because it actually builds real pages, a full set of metatags for each page, and an accurate Google sitemap as part of the simple editing process, it seems SEO friendly as well. It is Light N Easy CMS. My role as the website designer will be to devise a template for each site (and disable or remove all other templates), which simple means creating a PHP fime and a CSS file. The software even takes care of linking the CSS. It is also constructed in nice, straightforward PHP, allowing the designer / developer to include all sorts of other stuff in the pages just as plug-ins.

The thing comes in two flavours; a genuine flat file version and a SQLite version. I have plumped for the SQLite version. I fully understand that SQLite isn't as powerful as a genuine relational database such as MySQL, and it may be fractionally slower than a a site driven by a 'grown-up' database. However, we are talking about sites of less than 50 pages in general and the simplicity of the user interface is the real selling point.

It can be a nightmare to read a .db file if you don't know what you are looking for, so I have got myself a copy of SQlite Database Manager just in case the db for any of their sites gets corrupted and needs amending manually.

The one thing i am not sure of yet is the security of Light N Easy sites, but it bit more Googling should get that sorted.

I know customers will still make a hash of things sometimes, but far less than when they go into the XHTML and try to make amendments.

You never know, the clients may even decide to pay a little more; one can only hope.