I work for a small national homelessness charity (www.emmaus.org.uk); we’re looking to develop our website and would really appreciate some advice about what our options are.

We introduced a CMS site in November 03 - it’s been great as it’s allowed our local projects to create and update their own pages.   However, there are now a couple of major issues with the site which we need to deal with:

1) We need to add a password protected area (there is currently a password protected discussion board, but no space for news, downloads etc) for members of our local projects.
2) The site isn’t very accessible.

There are a few other bits and pieces which we’d also like to change, but  we can’t  make any significant changes to the site structure or the templates at the moment without going back to the designer, who is likely to charge us and has been difficult to deal with.

Do we need to buy a new CMS and start again from scratch?  Or could we get someone to develop the existing one? I’m not entirely sure who our existing CMS belongs to and where this leaves us with developing it further.  Could anybody give me any idea what our options are?  Obviously, being a charity, our budget is limited but we need to come up with a solution that will be best value for money in the long term.   

Rosi Jack
Communications Officer
Emmaus

Developing a CMS from scratch is expensive (typically).

You may want to consider an open source (and hence free) software application like mambo.  (www.mamboserver.com or search google for "mambo CMS" and you'll see there are many sites offering this).

Someone will probably be able to put together a suitable CMS for you that you can then run yourselves that should fit your requirements.  You can post a project on www.mamlance.com or www.mambolance.com.  I should think you can get what you want for £500-£1000 and certainly under £2000.  Tough to imagine anyone developing a CMS for you for that kind of money.

You will of course have to see if it fits your current environment.  Opensource tends to favour PHP, MySql etc over microsoft flavours..

Good luck. 

On 16:50:30 24 March 2005 RosiJack wrote:

I work for a small national homelessness charity (www.emmaus.org.uk); we’re looking to develop our website and would really appreciate some advice about what our options are.

We introduced a CMS site in November 03 - it’s been great as it’s allowed our local projects to create and update their own pages.   However, there are now a couple of major issues with the site which we need to deal with:

1) We need to add a password protected area (there is currently a password protected discussion board, but no space for news, downloads etc) for members of our local projects.
2) The site isn’t very accessible.

There are a few other bits and pieces which we’d also like to change, but  we can’t  make any significant changes to the site structure or the templates at the moment without going back to the designer, who is likely to charge us and has been difficult to deal with.

Do we need to buy a new CMS and start again from scratch?  Or could we get someone to develop the existing one? I’m not entirely sure who our existing CMS belongs to and where this leaves us with developing it further.  Could anybody give me any idea what our options are?  Obviously, being a charity, our budget is limited but we need to come up with a solution that will be best value for money in the long term.   

Rosi Jack
Communications Officer
Emmaus

Many thanks to all those who responded - I now have a much better idea of some of the things I ought to know but don't, which is a good start!

Rosi Jack
Emmaus
www.emmaus.org.uk