content management system advice.

[dmizer]

i'm trying to put together a professional level website, but my css and php experience is pretty limited. i've been looking at content management systems and i've been having difficulty landing on something that meets my needs. so, i thought i'd see if anyone had some advice.

i tried joomla and a couple of other professional level cms but they're WAY over my head. sat down with joomla for about 3 hours and couldn't get it to do squat for me beyond rendering the css useless.

found 'cms made simple' which is exactly the level of usability i need, but it's missing feature i can't do without. specifically an e-commerce module. there are suggestions that a module will be available at the end of the month, but the author is going to be charging for the beta release.

although there are other cms systems on the same level, part of my problem is that i am in need of a system with fully bilingual japanese-english capability.

anyone have my magic bullet?

[az]

Have you tried drupal?

[matthew]

Have you tried drupal?I'll second the recommendation. http://drupal.org

[compiledkernel]

actually cruise on over to

http://opensourcecms.com , and try out for whatever you need. That site is the best to rate what you might be looking for that I know of.

[darrenm]

Joomla / Mambo should be fairly easy to get them to do what you want? Stick with them a bit :)

[dmizer]

drupal is pretty sweet, thanks for the tip.

it's taking some getting use to, but i'm able to manage content fairly easily. customizing the look is more difficult though as i've not found a css editor for the stylesheets and as such, i'm stuck with the defaults and can't change nifty things like colors and fonts. but i suspect i'll find something that will allow me that level of editing as well.

going to add an ecommerce module next to see if it's going to be possible to adapt it for use here in japan. ugh, different addressing system, different postal system, different banking system, taxes ... yeesh. what a nightmare ... anyone have thoughts on that?

sorry darrenm, but i've been playing with joomla on and off for about 2 months now, and i have yet to figure out how to put a custom banner in with my corporate logo instead of the joomla default ... ugh. i can manipulate some content and edit the layout on a very minimal level, but it's just too unwieldy.

[dmizer]

ugh ... drupal's ecommerce integration is behind. i can't find anything viable for the current release of drupal, and nothing seems to be forthcoming.

[oxman]

Have you had a look at zen-cart? It is a cart but also acts as a CMS using their Easy Pages feature. Have a look.
http://www.zen-cart.com/forum/index.php