Suitable CMS for a Computer Hardware & Software Catalog [Computer-Legacy]

Hello Everyone,

My name is Dan and I am the webmaster for www.computer-legacy.com.

I have been working on this website as a personal project in my free time - please excuse the state of the site, its not... great, but its getting there.

The main aim of the site (as explained on the home-page) is to catalog as many pieces of legacy software (usually pre-2005 back to DOS days) with their system requirements listed (which is sourced) and a short overview of the software. There was an idea to make it so that visitors could download the freeware/shareware/demoware entries - but I have removed that feature for the moment.

To put it in laymans terms I have three catalogs:
- A software catalog
- A source catalog (these are linked/referenced to the listings in the software catalog - so you can find where that version of software originates from)
- A hardware catalog (which provides the technical details about old computer hardware and equipment)

At the moment I am using the MODx Revolution CMS - which is great, and very easy to use - but I am worried that it will not grow with the website. It runs slow with the various pages created (for example expanding containers with more containers in it), and it lacks features to make my website easy to navigate (see the end of this post for features I would like/require). I am hunting for a suitable CMS for my project, something that uses databases but isn't too complex to create and is flexible. It also needs to be "quick" for me to input the information.

The website is currently hosted with HostGator on their Hatchling plan - which is a low-tier shared web hosting service, which is fine for the moment and I understand I will not get similar performance that you will receive from a dedicated server. But for the moment, the website isn't very big and the price is more than reasonable.

As I said, I feel that MODx isn't suitable for my website. And think a CMS which works using a database and has heavy usage in similar applications such as ecommerce would be something to be considered. MODx lacks some features that I would like to use on my website.

One of the main wants is an advanced search tool that uses "live" filters - similar to those you find on many popular ecommerce websites like Amazon or eBay. What I mean by this is that lets take a handful of computer software listings. One is for MS-DOS 5.0, two are for Windows 95, one is for Windows 98 and three are for Windows 2000. I would like it so that on the search/browse page you can tick to show all products that are both for Windows 95 and Windows 98 - and for the results to be updated in realtime or something similar. I'm sure there is a way to do this, and there was a plug-in for MODx - however (this is common) the plug in was written in another language (Cryllic Russian) and badly documented.

Currently I use a lot of Template Variables (TV's) in MODx which are data fields (text, integer, dates, richtext, media) - these make up forms that I fill in with the information such as the system requirements - Operating System, Processor Type, Processor Speed, RAM capacity, Graphics Type, Graphics Memory, Resolution, Sound, Peripherals, Hard Disk Space, Network Requirements. I then use templates which reference the template variable data and display it on the page in a table. (see page examples at the end of this post).

My pages are pretty standard, and I am likely to change the look of the website again - I want to try and keep it quite basic but an interesting experience (the reason for the Win9x theming). I do rely heavily on templates however to try and keep a consistent feel, style and quality to the website. The only "fancy" thing right now on the pages is an image slider, which I am not overly joyed about, it doesn't fit in with the style of the website (however I'm sure an afternoon with the Adobe CS I could fix that). On that note I hope there are image sliders available for other popular systems (Drupal, Joomla) that can work alongside the database and can cope with the "unlimited" amount of images - because for example some listings may have 1 or 2 images, and others can have as many as 10.

The website also has slightly more miscellaneous sections including a small selection of user manuals, tutorials, print advert archive, reviews section and a news section (which is to be added, blog style hopefully).

Thats all I can think of for now. I will post some example pages that have been published so far. I really would like to start using a different more capable CMS rather soon and I'm drowning in old software compilation discs waiting to be published .

Current Examples:
Homepage
Software listings page
Example software listing
Second example software listing
Example source listing
Example hardware listing
My current search/filter tool (its not great)

I look forward to reading your replies,

Thanks Dan