Getting Technical

As a welcome change from my usual rantings ,(and I must apologise for the sketchiness of my previous post - it was written whilst listening to the commentary on the League Cup Semi Final Second Leg, the one where we didn't just stick it to the Arse, but stuck it right up the Arse), I'm going to take a brief interlude from the usual madness and get technical, instead. To be accurate, I'm going to moan about how I've failed to get technical over the past few days. As some of you might recall, I've been pondering the conversion of The Sleaze to a dynamic site (or, at the very least, the incorporation of some dynamic elements in order to make it more manageable), for some time. Indeed, I've finally made a start on producing new page templates with cleaner code. However, my search for a 'back end' to marry to these templates is still drawing a blank. I've looked at a plethora of open source Content Management Systems (CMS), including all the 'big' ones - Drupal, Joomla, Mambo, Xoops, etc - and a whole load of far more obscure ones, without finding anything remotely suitable.

The trouble is that all of these are wedded to the idea that CMS users can't produce their own CSS/HTML web pages, and instead impose their own (in my opinion) very rigid and uninspiring templates on any site you try to develop. Look, I feel like screaming, I already have a set of page templates I'm perfectly happy with - I just want some kind of article management system to put behind them! Many of these CMSs also seem to obsessed with how many bells and whistles they can incorporate, in the form of calenders, search facilities, forums, chat rooms and the like. Once again, most of us are more than capable of adding these ourselves, if we want them. The few CMSs I've found which allow greater page design flexibility have been poorly documented and not terribly user-friendly. For God's sake, surely there must be someone out there who can come up with a lightweight CMS which can be integrated with an existing web design?