I’m working on a plan to rebuild a fairly huge university website. There’s all kinds of background on this in my blog, but basically it’s a mess and there’s no budget. I was thinking of reverting to the old server side includes method of content management, but I’ve been reading that .NET has some pretty useful tools built in for managing the look and feel outside of content.
Frankly, I’ve never had time to dig into .NET and these people want immediate results, but I’d like to move forward in a manner that makes sense for future development.
Can anyone recommend a course of action? Is there a free-ish CMS out there that will let me manager user permissions at the page level and all the other things that come with a multi-user content management environment? Is .NET the way to go (and can you recommend the best books to get me moving fast)? Can I manage the asp includes required to format and navigate the whole site without going completely insane?