I built a website using Joomla last year. I found it to be cumbersome and very unintuitive, and although I did get the template looking pretty good, it felt like I was designing the site backwards.

So right now, I’m building another CMS for a client, this time in Website Baker.

What a huge difference! WB is a much smaller and simpler CMS than Joomla, and in turn it has fewer choices when it comes to templates and modules. But it’s super-simple to use – I will admit that it took me the better part of a day to figure out why I couldn’t see my CSS styles in FCKEditor, one of the available WYSIWYG editors that you can install as a module.

I’ve found the forums to be so-so. I couldn’t find the answers to my questions about styling there, and only got one response. However, once I figured out the CSS issue, I cranked through a lot of other work very quickly.

Styling lists, images, and other elements has been pretty easy. The templating only took a few hours, maybe about half a day, and it looks really nice. I started with one of the free templates available for download on the WB site and worked from there, inserting the pertinent bits of PHP code into my layout.

I made the template first, then dropped in and styled the content. Right now I’m working on styling the sidebar menu and I have a few other elements to work on, but I’m close to handing this over to the client for more content.

I’ve been really impressed with the program, especially after a rather frustrating experience with Joomla, and I would recommend Website Baker for both experienced users and newcomers to CMS’s. The user interface is so much simpler than Joomla but still it’s a powerful little program.

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