CMS Hell; Part I;”The introduction”

Båstad Chamber Music Festival wants a new web site. And who can blame them? But naturally it should be a CMS of some sort. Thus the task for the weekend was: Find a decent CMS to use. This turned out to be cumbersome and boring.These were my requirements when I started:

• Ease of use. The editors of the site should not have to be more than normal computer users to edit the site. Without any education. A WYSIWYG editor is implicit here folks.
• Simple to administer. I don’t need a lot o features, I need something which is simple and flexible and clean.
• Multilingual content. It must support multiple content languages, and still be easy to use.
• It must be possible to install on any decent web host without root access as I don’t know  as yet how the hosting will be provided. With decent I mean: MySQL and possibly Java on a reliable web host.

I would also like, but do not require:

• Java. As I’m no fan of PHP (aving worked to little with it) I’d prefer Java.
• A lot of extensions and themes. Although I don’t particularly need the extensions for this client and will probably end up doing a new theme, the choices would be nice to have.

I absolutely don’t want:

• Cluttered PHP.
• Cluttered installations or cluttered admin interfaces A cluttered interface, be it disc or gui or api points to a cluttered mind.

Check the next post for our first contendant, Joomla!