There is no such thing as a dumb questions. Right ? :)

I sure hope so

I just designed my first relatively complex website, it's a 3-columb layout, with the middle columb on the home page reserved for news. I don't want to enter the page code and write every news I post on the website. I need some easy system, that ads new news on the page without much trouble, places news posts in a archive which will be accesible to the visitors, when the page has more than x news posts, I have to be able to fully css format the news posts and maybe a few other features.

So how do I do this ? ;

 

its called wordpress

 

The dumbest question is the one that is Never asked!

 

I don't think wordpress is what I am looking for. Or maybe I don't know how to use it. I don't need a blog I need to integrate news on the front page of my website. I am still not sure of how that's done. Just as a example, I need something similar to how they run news on this site's front page http://www.starcraft.org/. How do they do it ?

 

Ok, after further study, I need a news publishing script free and fully css customizable. Any recommendations ?

 

ok first thing.. saw the link and you could make that using only wordpress.. but you would have to hack WP a bit to make it work just like that.

anyhow what you need is basically any sort of decent CMS system have a look here www.cmsmatrix.org . You'll be able to find hundreds..

If you don't want to go over to that site and do all that reading and start right away I'd recommend:

joomla: it's easy to set up and coding is very simple here. you can have your site done and lauched in less than 1 week

drupal: i've only used it once so i'm no expert here but it seems to have hundreds of fans here in DP.

ezPublish: probably the best choice as it's a very powerful CMS but you'll have a learning curve. might take a few weeks to actually figure it all out but if you're interested in someday turning that site into a huge portal and offer loads more services eZ is a good choice.

 

I am such a noob, after designing the layout and everything I started building the site. The home page, index.php is basically html and css, and php includes for the navigation and footer. And I was thinking I need a script or something to run the news. This is my first complex site am I thinking at this the wrong way ? I installed WP and it gave me a blog, I installed joomla on my server and saw a full website, which I don't know if it's what I wanted, or am I going on this the wrong way ? How exactly am I supposed to use a cms ?

 

if you're strong point is not php and digging into any type of coding then yes, you better install the CMS first such as Joomla and first learn what it does and how you can adapt to it and not the other way around.

try to read a quick tutorial on setting up websites with joomla.. basically you'll need to learn how to set up sections and categories, how to link them to the menu and you'll have at least the content showing.. later on start looking into modules, mambots and other components you can keep on adding to joomla

 

definately wordpress or Blogger...that one is pretty neat too!