Actinic for Schools???

[Rich Brady]

Hello all, I have an idea and I thought I'd run it passed you guys first.

I've been approached by a school that are looking to have there website redesigned.

They want to be able to add certain content themselves and even get the pupils involved in ICT Lessons.

Originally I thought about building the site in Dreamweaver, but my concern is that is they delve too deep the site may end up broken.

After pondering I wondered whether building them a site in Catalog would be an idea, obviuosly they wouldn't need the E-commerce side of things, but using the Fragments and moding a few layouts I thought it would be a more robust approach. Any thoughts?

[Rich Brady]

I've just realised the title of this thread makes it sound like some sort of Tesco promotion...

[acompton]

Actinic seems a bit expensive for what they want. How about a freebie Content Management System?

[Rich Brady]

That was my concern... I've not had to implement any CMS into my sites yet, could you recommend any?

[Mike Hughes]

Is actinic lite / 25 (or whatever) still around?

Have a word with actinic and see what they say. This version only does up to 25 products, but as they don't need any then it might be an idea. It's often given away as a promotional item with the magazines.

Mike

[acompton]

Why would they want products to be there at all? Its just going to cause confusion

[Mark H]

Adobe Contribute? - often bundled with Dreamweaver.

[Darren B]

Theres a few open source cms programs around

• CPG Dragonfly
• CivicSpace
• Drupal
• E107
• Geeklog
• Jetbox
• Joomla
• Mambo
• PHPNuke
• PostNuke
• Typo3
• Xoops
• phpWebSite
• Nucleus
• Soholaunch
• Xoops
• phpWiki

I have not tried these but theres plenty to chose from when cost is an issue

[RuralWeb]

I read somewhere that there were currently over 1200 CMS about - lots to pick from.

[Darren B]

kin ell - good luck then

[Rich Brady]

I read somewhere that there were currently over 1200 CMS about - lots to pick from.

[completerookie]

I'm 99% certain, I've seen actinic-lite (25 items) available on one of this month's magazine, but for the life of me I can't remember exactly which one.

[jont]

Maybe worth approaching Bruce Townsend at Actinic to see if they want to supply several copies of the Lite version... future potential designers using their products etc. Worth an email.

[Rich Brady]

Maybe worth approaching Bruce Townsend at Actinic to see if they want to supply several copies of the Lite version... future potential designers using their products etc. Worth an email.

Cheers Jont, I'll get in touch...

[rob880]

I don't know why you'd even consider Actinic for this.

I've used Joomla to design several sites...

1) It's free
2) Students can assign their own accounts and access privileges (publisher, editor, author etc)
3) Once it's installed (the hardest part) it's really easy to maintain publish and create new content and pages.

This is an Actinic forum and I'm 100% behind it as an e-commerce product, but to try and taylor it for a standalone CMS website it absurd.

I didn't design this site a friend with very little technical knowledge did, but it is similar in scope to a school website.