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As a side project I tutor grandparents and other computer novices in Computer & Internet 101, from physically using a mouse to dealing with e-mail/searching/etc. Web development isn't really my area of focus - I do have reasonable HTML/CSS/Javascript etc skills, so I can throw together a decent-looking simple, static site - but occasionally I get asked to put together extremely simple websites for these people, that they can update themselves; that is, edit text-based content without giving Grandpa a heart attack by making him come face-to-face with HTML/Javascript.

I've waded through a mile-long list of CMS software - largely culled from the many other similar questions on SO - but they've all got something ruling it out: hosted, restricts the design (can't use w/existing CSS, looks "Word-press-y", etc), not free/FOSS, etc. I wonder if "CMS" is even the right word for what I'm looking for. What I need is a simple text editor for the client: that is, something that will give the client a text box of some variety, let them edit it, and update the content with that info. They can't mess with navigation, add new pages, change anything other than text. If it was really fancy, they could upload a picture.

I was planning to do this just with a couple of password-protected php forms, but thought I'd ask if there's anything already out there that might provide this functionality? Any suggestions on building my own version of this, in PHP or something else?

What I'm really interested in is:

1) the simplicity/customize-ability of the admin interface (or lack of admin interface, if the client could somehow edit directly in the page), and

2) ease of set up for me (not getting paid much if at all for this, don't want to wade through three million plugin options to figure out how to get some unwieldy, high learning-curve framework to do what I want).

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I can't prevent anyone from flagging this as a possible duplicate, but please know that I'm only posting this after I went through a pretty exhaustive list of SO questions tagged "CMS" (exhausting, too). The closest I found is this: A “CMS” for a one-page site?, but it doesn't address if there's a pre-rolled solution out there. –  Beekguk Jun 20 '11 at 23:55

3 Answers 3

Try pulsecms.

Here is another very simple CMS that has JQuery and modernizr , HTML5 Boilerplate and TinyMCE.

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pulse seems to cost 25 USD –  expiredninja Feb 21 '12 at 13:27
$25/$30 is a pretty low cost if it fits your needs, particularly if you are using it in a freelance gig. –  LocalPCGuy Feb 4 at 15:48

I have my wife setup with Windows LiveWriter


This means that she just builds her articles as if she is using a word processor (almost exactly the same) and then just uploads the article to her blog. I use Blogengine.net to host the blog on a Godaddy hosting solution.

Blogengine comes with built in support for LiveWriter and only required that you input the address, username and password in.

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I understand this is an old post, but i hope someone find this of interest. You could give the users the instruction to upload text files to the site, and the have the HTLM/PHP/ASP pages load the context of such .ts files. Each web page should have a specific named .txt file associated.

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