So I want to start up a site called pleasehavemercy. I would like it to include stories of peoples bad/funny expiriences in life. I'd like it so people can post comments on the stories and such. I want it fully automated so I want a CMS system so here is my question:

1. Which CMS system should I use?

2. Who can do good skin designs for CMS's?

Using an article tools makes no difference. If you use www.vezine.com, you can easily port templates from templatemonster.com to the system. Imagine the large collection of templates over there, you can build up as much theme as you want in your Vezine system. When you are bored with the design, just do a simple click to switch the templates. Sweet and slick.

my favortie cms tool is mambo, it has grown enormously and you can get so mcuh supoort for it now, plus its free.

MamboCMS is pretty nice.

I dislike CMS's though: why not just code it yourself? You could probably do a hack job on a forum and get the same functionality with a better code base and less clutter.

www.drupal.org might do the job

Definitely Druapl or XOOP. I did a huge comparison after having a terrible experience with PHP-Nuke. Both are great!!!

check out hotscripts .com they have a lot of that stuff over there

Thats for your suggestions, can anyone list someone who can skin any of these?

Have you considered using forum software to power this website? Might be quite an interesting community where people can reply and discuss the stories etc.

Originally posted by banners2go
Have you considered using forum software to power this website? Might be quite an interesting community where people can reply and discuss the stories etc.

Thought about it but I thought a CMS system with comments would be better as it would be easier to read stories and rate them.

I know this may sound stupid but im sure you could use something like wordpress, even cutenews make a plugin that allows users to sign up and then get posting :)

php-nuke ... with the security patches appplied from nuke resources

Checkout CMSMatrix.org. They've done an exhaustive comparison of dozens of CMS solutions.

you should use mambo cms, i really like it.