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Rupert, a good friend of mine posed a website/CMS question to me last week... he's looking at managing and archiving articles and educational pieces he posts on his site's home page, and asked me for some opinion. I happened to have some to offer, centering around my to-date WordPress experience.

Here's how it went:

MY FRIEND: "...I'm looking at a couple of open source content management systems, and it occurred to me that you have more experience with this than I do..."

AND THEN ME (it's a long one!): Thanks for the click-thru test (I'd asked him to check my new AdSense deployment). I think you may be responsible for the 90 cents I earned today, and now I know adsense is somehow working.

On CMS, you're right, it is veRy much like blogspotting. I'm not sure I could tell myself or anybody else what the substantial difference is. To answer your question, yes, WordPress will accomplish what you want but you have to commit to the whole platform (themes, plug-ins, widgets), unless you know how to convert your already existing html site (or just your desired parts of it) into being WordPress-able for the backend management. Talking about your Read More and Categorizing and Archiving.

This means looking for a WordPress theme that 1)pretty much already does the functions the way you want and 2) has enough customizable stuff to make it look the way you want. Header, footer, images, colors, fonts, etc.

It really is a different environment to that of the from-scratch jewel that you have (i'm being serious). Once you jump into the backend and see all the crazy cool stuff you can do and manipulate, I think you will be sold as I am. My friend is a great, driven explorer of the code :) and did a fantastic job building his own html/css site, CartoonThunder.com.

Especially when you start putting stuff together for clients! You can offer SO many cool and valuable features that are impressive and, I have recently found, expected by clients. It goes way beyond what you and I are capable of programming at our current knowledge base(s).

To me, it's kind of like those aluminum pipes you were talking about; although you didn't make them, shape them, etc., you do polish them and install them they way you like and to what suits your needs - they become your product...

Also look at Joomla with the same eye as WordPress. I got my left little toe wet with that platform a while ago. In my opinion, has the same mission as WordPress but with some different flavors & attitudes.

You already know about the platforms being free -- there are t-o-n-s of equally free themes and plug-ins available. I have a little experience with a couple of the not-free themes, too, and well, I liiiiike it. Also have had fairly good experiences with support from forums and theme authors.

Here's a suggestion: create a subdomain, upload & install WordPress 2.8 (downloaded from wordpress.org). Find a couple of themes that look interesting, download them and then put them into the WP 'themes' folder in your subdomain and start playing around. Probably take you less than 30 minutes to do those installations.

Have a monkeytastic afternoon.

As it turns out, my friend dove into some css & java juice that lead him to an alternative solution - one that allowed for some custom content management without switching his entire operation over to a CMS platform. Perhaps there will be more to come on this.