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I'd second CushyCMS - it's really easy to get up an running with minimal changes to the existing site.

Liamario wrote: »

I have decided on using cushy. With the other ones, a knowledge of php seems important and they appear to make it difficult for me to simply apply a CSS.

The only downside is having to leave the site in order to edit it. But I guess it does the job :-)

With all that said, I'm going to starting learning some of the other CMSs and Php as well.

Wordpress might be a good one to go for next. You'll hear a lot of 'just a Wordpress site' comments, but it's now a pretty powerful CMS out of the box & most importantly, is intuitive for clients (etc) to use — so less time fielding questions once the site is handed over.

Plus, lots of hosting companies offer one button installation & even standard installation is a doddle. (All that said, still prefer Drupal in terms of PHP sites but much bigger learning curve!)

To get started, I'd take a look at a few themes & see the how they're put together. But once you're comfortable & want to create your own theme, I'd say start by creating flat HTML pages first & them fitting the dynamism into your templates, rather than trying to start from someone else's pre-existing template & trying to retrofit your design to their base HTML.

Liamario wrote: »

Thanks for the advice feathers. I think my main problem with php is having a practical use for it; in terms of applying some php to site other than the contact page.
Is there somewhere I can go that can give me practical tutorials to implement on a site?

Well your biggest practical use will be in separating the content from the HTML. So rather than having a file for each page on your site, you instead create your pages to templates. So, looking at any medium - large website (Apple, Amazon, BBC, whatever) — you may have thousands of pages, but maybe as few as 5 – 10 templates: then different content is plugged in to them (& maybe different styles applied).

PHP allows you to be dynamic in certain mark-up (e.g. applying a class to a div based on the section of the site that it's in) & also allows you to connect to a database to populating your HTML pages with.

You can check out W3Schools pages on PHP & MySQL maybe to start off on this. But a CMS will look after the connection to the DB for you (once set up), & manage user log-ins, editors for content & all that. I would suggest that this might be an easier primer, as a lot gets abstracted away to begin with.

Maybe try getting Wordpress set up & check out there docs on theme development — http://codex.wordpress.org/Theme_Development. Although I always find unpicking other people's code can be as informative as starting from scratch, so take a look at how they're putting together their default themes too.

I used this video tutorial guide to set up a basic CMS

http://www.developphp.com/view.php?tid=323&t=Part_1_How_to_Build_PHP_and_MySQL_Custom_CMS_Website_Software

The result is very basic but it works and for me was a great introduction to some of the things you can do with PHP, pretty easy once you have done this to develop further upon it in to something usefull.