Back in my programming days I wrote my own content management system that I used on my personal web-page for a while. It eventually got replaced with MovableType, since most of the content I was updating was bloggish text anyway. Once the comment and trackback spammers started attacking, though, I pretty much left that behind and moved more of my updating to LiveJournal. I've played a bit with some others, but didn't commit to the switch. There was a recent write-up here comparing some of the current players in the market (again, with a blog bent more than anything else, but in a lot of cases, they can work for general content as well).

Thanks for the link! I'd never thought of using my Word Press installation as a CMS. I looked at the example they cited that seemed to involve photos and I see the guy had integrated his Word Press and Gallery to work together. I like that - and had read that Gallery was well-suited for integration - but I hadn't thought of that sort of application.

I wonder if Coppermine would do that (reasonably) easily? The Coppermine help boards crash my Mozilla, forcing me to read them using IE. I haven't explored the program's full help as a result. I'll look over at Word Press's support boards. Thanks for the thought food.

Think about what you want to do with your web site. Once you figure that out, select a CMS that allows you to do the things you want with the least effort.

You could get a blogger blog and FTP it to the front page to tell people about updates for almost no effort, and if that's all you need, you may not want to go to more. If your goal is to tinker (which is one of mcroft's goals, always, you should get something more powerful.

Tinkering is a definite side benefit. Knowing more expands my thinking of what's possible. I seem to have to do things the hard way: picking a system that fits what I'm imagining, finding its limitations when I want to do something new, living with it until it annoys me into picking a new system...

I want a better integration of disparate elements - for instance, someone looking at pics I took of filming locations in Vancouver doesn't know that there's also an account of having lunch with Christopher Judge from the same event on the website. Much less that there are pictures of indoor pics of filming locations or even other pics of the actors available. I want more "suggestions" based on page content. It's probably irrelevant to anyone but me but it's something I want to do.

The photo album software I'm using is cool but it uses one template for everything. I'm certain I could tailor it better to what I want...I'm not even 100% that what I want is a CMS system. Looking at the integration of Gallery and Word Press was eye-opening. I'm hoping Coppermine will be as friendly...