Ok, Joomla, Wordpress, e107, Drupal and PHP-Nuke (and all its children), are fine for an experienced admin, but I am looking for something free, open, evolving and easy for idio......err newb.....err inexperienced admins to keep clean and running. Preferably something that is easy to design themes for. I am doing this for a friend's DDO guild, I am not getting paid for it, I don't want much to do with it other than checking for upgrades every week or so and uploading them to my server (a reasonably up to date LAMP box sitting at a local colo). Any suggestions?
Go with Wordpress If you aren't getting paid and don't want to spend a lot of time on this project, then I would recommend you scrap creating your own theme and just choose a large FOS CMS that has lots of available themes. (Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla) Whichever you choose you will have to spend time learning how they work, but Wordpress will be the easiest of the three. My vote: Wordpress (P.S. I use Drupal, but it has a steep learning curve. If you want something super simple with free hosting --> Google Sites).
ROFL, all of these are beyond people who have trouble with "the installer thingy for DDO" and can't even figure out where in their filesystem they left notes for that night's crawl. Oh, and the forum in Wordpress is bad... (Note: learning curve isn't a challenge for me, but when you get a 14 year old gamer that doesn't understand what a drive letter is, let alone an install path... well, let us say, he may be an officer in the guild but he really should not be doing anything but posting. Now imagine his bruised little ego going into tantrum mode over "you can't have mod privs because you don't get how to use them" and you begin to understand why I put easy into what I was looking for) CMS Made Simple, while easy, relies upon smarties for templates, ugh. Oh, and from what I can see, needs an external forum system. (Two pieces of software to manage, plus the headaches of maintaining two user databases, again, not getting paid=too much time spent updating these things to keep script kiddies from owning my colo box) Google sites=no forums, too much editability of the front page, learning curve problems for idiots, no easy reset. Until Contao gets back to me, I cannot say why I will not be using them.
I haven't seen this mentioned but Concrete5 is really great. It's my first experience with a CMS and I am a total newbie. If I can figure it out I think just about anyone can!