Dick,
Dick Middleton wrote:
There's 2 simple CMSs which may fit your needs better than Drupal. Firstly look at phpsqlitecms. It's almost trivially simple, the data base is part of it so install& admin is easy. It's not a full featured CMS but it works as far as it goes. Here's a little thing I knocked up for a friend http://www.asstec.co.uk.
The other one I like is cmsmadesimple. This is more conventional but again is not fully featured but great for simple sites. Here's what another friend did with it: http://www.johnchivall.co.uk/
Nice pointers. Any sense of whether either of them are any good at email and list integration (e.g., subscribing to content updates by email)? I tend to need that in a lot of the work I do - which tends to push me to WordPress and Drupal, though their respective email and list integration modules always seem to lag the main release (I miss the OG2list module). For some reason folks who develop CMS software don't seem to do email very well, and people who do list managers don't seem to do web interfaces very well. About the only good open-source combination I've ever seen is groupserver (http://groupserver.org/groupserver), but development is by a tiny group in Australia, and they've never really built a larger development/support community around it.
My experience with websites in a box it that they're not awfully good, but worse, you get trapped into their web hosting and domain management. If you find don't like like them you've got a hassle extracting yourself and starting again.
Can you say vendor lock-in?
Miles