[Techtalk] web content management recommendations

[Chris Hardy]

Dan,
you should be able to use any cms/wms that has a stylesheet switcher, so no
need to rewrite templates if your web pages conform to web standards
recommendations (http://www.w3c.org). If your pages are not standards based,
well, yes, you'll have to create new templates - that's why it's cheaper in
the long run to build sites that are standards-based <g>. 

If the system you choose does not have a switcher, it's quite easy to build,
you just pass a parameter to a script that selects the appropriate
stylesheet either in the event driven control (e.g. onClick) or you can
embed the parameter in the file like this List Apart article advocates
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/phpswitch/ (basically equivalent to an
onLoad event in a procedural kind of way)

My current favorites are 
obliquid http://dev.obliquid.com/ 
mambo http://www.mamboserver.com/, 
Drupal http://www.drupal.org/ 
Typo3 http://typo3.org/

However, the barrier I most often run into with the cms' out there is that
there are too many features, and the features often end up defining the
requirements. Also, if you have multiple authors, then part of selecting a
system will be identifying the workflow you need (e.g. do you need
rollbacks? does an editor approve content before publishing to the site? do
they need to save drafts? etc)

You may want to check out these websites

default installations that you can test
http://www.opensourcecms.com/

matrix to compare features
http://www.cmsmatrix.org/matrix

oscom
http://www.oscom.org/matrix/index.html

hth
- Chris