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[recordlovelife]

Maybe the title might be a little off, but hopefully if you clicked this thread, you'll read on.

I am a LAMP developer, and I've recently started designing sites for clients that don't have a clue about web design.

At first, if they needed a news updater, I would make a simple form, with an input to put a title, and a content area, and a photo uploader. It automatically grabs the date, stores it in MySQL, and then I load it all into a template.
But I found I spent to much time trying to format the output and fixing little glitches, and it took time away from developing an awesome site.

So then I looked into cms. I've tried joomla, cmsms, phpnuke, etc. And they have have their pros and cons. I don't think there is anything wrong with them, but they are just excessive for what im looking for. Joomla had all the formatting you could ever want in content output, but it was too confusing for a basic internet user, I feel. And CMSMS was great on simplicity, but offered no format outputting.

Here is what I want: I use smarty, so I make a php file and load up my variables, then I load up my tpl with everything I need, and I attach my css. I want to find a very basic cms system so that in my tpl file, I can just include a couple of tags to load the content saved when my clients uses the cms. But the cms needs to offer output formatting, and that needs to be recognized when loading into a page (similar to how this post will recognize a bold tag when I put it in. )

So my question is not "tell me what I should do", its "Tell me what your system is for designing for clients that don't know about web design"

Maybe your system might help me to rethink my algoriths helping me in the future. In the end, we ALL have something to teach each other, this should help to inform about new software you may not know about, new stratigies, tricks, hacks, etc.

Thanks in advance.
Frank

[fiv3isaliv3]

Mambo or WordPress.