Our team has a fairly basic website that is pretty simple but worked well enough when I designed it and had time on my hands.

These days I really don’t have time to manage it and want a simple cms type system to do it.

any suggestions that do this?:

– easy to set up on our web hosting (which includes databases)
– templates that I can use as a starting point and then tweak to match the club’s colors, etc.
– can be managed from Android tablet/phone as that’s what I have to hand most of the time.

Thanks in advance.

I’ve used Textpattern for a club website. Easy to set up and customise with a good support community. It’s free too. If you want to spend on a CMS then I’ve heard that Expression Engine is good.

I would look at WordPress or Joomla – both very well supported, free, plenty of add ons when you are ready to expand, both support various users/groups, they are both administered online.

Bump for the weekday crowd. Ta

WordPress – just because there are so many templates and forums available to get you started.

And having created CMS with all the features a client wants and then they never use i’d point most people towards wordpress.

Its super easy to set up on a windows server – you can do it from IIS web platform installer.

Thanks for that.

My web host offers ‘one click’ setup for wordpress amongst others but I do wonder if that somehow ties me in with them – eg it becomes difficult to migrate the content if I wanted to change host. Anyone know about that?

I have a wordpress site and I have wondered the same thing. I have been merrily adding content but it only exists in the cloud in a format I have no idea about. Would like to at least back it up and it would be nice to have a copy that I could take elsewhere. I presume you can just copy the database but I haven’t looked into this. Another job for the list. On the plus side it was easy to set up and I can edit it from my Android phone

With WordPress, you just export the database, import into the new location, job done – last one I did, I transferred it to a new host in 5 minutes. Add 10 minutes if you have a bunch of plugins to reinstall.

OK, so I don’t lose anything by using the one click setup then? I guess I’ll use that if it’s as simple as it sounds.

Yup – the only thing I do as an occasional backup is to download the database occasionally. I now have most of my websites built on WordPress.

+1 for wordpress, lots of free responsive templates to choose from, easy to use CMS, plug-ins to do anything you want it to and fully open source.
Spend a bit of time thinking about what you want the site to do and find a template that requires the minimum amount of tweaking.

Just a note to say thanks. I’ve got our site up and running with wordpress

http://www.lvis.org.uk (any tips welcome! 🙂 )

Actually, one question – if I restore the db, presumably that doesn’t hold any of the media (eg pictures) that I’ve uploaded via WP so I guess I’d need to manually transfer those in order to do a restore to a different location/web host.

Yes, though you can just FTP the folder over. In fact, if you do transfer to a new host it’s often quicker to just FTP the complete WordPress installation over, that way it has all the customisations and plugins already installed.

That’ll work, will it? I kind of assumed that you’d need to actually install wp rather than just copy the files.

just thought I’d add further that wp is great. really easy to use, lots of free apps available to enhance it and even an android (and presumably iOS) app which I’m using to post news and update the site straight from my phone.

That’ll work, will it? I kind of assumed that you’d need to actually install wp rather than just copy the files.

Yes – WP is all written in PHP, so if you copy the files over and as long as you have the same file permissions, it’ll work happily. It’ll moan if it doesn’t have a database on the new server – let it set up a database, then import the DB you exported from the old site.

Or just transfer the database over as well – that’s not hard if you have a MySQL web front end on your web host (all decent ones will).

Have you installed Jetpack? Lots of handy extras, including one that automatically posts to your FB and Twitter when you add a new post on WP.

Thanks again.

Yes, I have jetpack installed. I didn’t notice that it did the autoposting to fb 😳 so I installed another plugin to do that. Still, at least I’ve learnt about fb apps now 🙂

WordPress is great. This site runs on it, as do many others you’ll likely frequent.