I'm a guv at the local infant school which has just expanded into primary school. I want to get away from using a web designer as they are invariably parents albeit professional or semi-professional web designers. Most school pages are simply text/image combinations and so getting a web designer to craft each page seems daft.
My day job is in IT and my research/playing has shown plone to be the best candidate given its built in approval workflow (which can re-configured via the web management tool).
For research, I set up a virtual server as mosso.com for $20 a month (hastle but it works and is cheap) to try but I think I'd prefer palepurple.co.uk hosting for 20 or 30 quid a month. This seems good value and you get hosting/support that is not dependent on a single guv/parent.
The front end to plone is cool out of the box but modifying the back end functionality is a lot of work as it is a bit of a rag-bag of parts (on top of Zope) and you need to know your server-side (python) stuff. However, you get a load of good stuff out of the box plus the capability to add all sorts of permission-driven intranet/extranet stuff when needed.
Discounted joomla as it lacks the workflow (approval) and plone seems future proof (although plone 4/5 could make some relatively large changes) - after all Nasa use plone in house.
Interested in other experiences of plone deployment and palepurple (of other plone) hosting.
Thanks
John
