[opencms-dev] Getting Started

[Bob Cohen]

I'm sure you've heard these questions a thousand times before but . . .
.  I'm a web designer who's tired of doing content updates for my
clients.  OpenCMS seems like a good platform to help with this.  The
problem is: I'm not a programmer and I can't seem to find a way in to
OpenCMS that allows actually build a project.

E.g., I fooled with creating the standard "hello world" jsp page.  It
worked.  I got an HTML form to display in another page.  But there's a
huge gulf between "Hello World" and an input form that allows users to
update and or add information on a particular web page.

By contrast, I've been looking at Xoops, which is a PHP/MySQL portal
package.  It comes with a whole bunch of modules for setting up a
ready-made portal, e.g., news, weblog, etc.  It allows me to design the
look and feel of the site while delivering a database driven web site
that's very rich in functionality, though somewhat clunky for my taste.
Are there analogous OpenSource (aka free) modules available under
OpenCMS?  Is OpenCMS really more of a platform that assumes a programmer
is involved?  Can I import an existing static HTML site into OpenCMS and
set it up so that content is editable through the OpenCMS interface?

I'm staring at a blank wall here!

Thanks.

Bob