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which is the best cms for landing pages?

Hello everyone, I have a question I can't find a good answer too using google search, so I'm coming here to ask my fellow web people.

I work for a company, I create lots of landing pages for different verticals (health, auto, home, etc), the landing pages are pretty simple, home page with short form, second page with longer form, thank you. page.

My question is this... what is best CMS or flat file CMS to do this efficiently? I want to have full flexibility in what I create, yet be able to reuse component / modules. I don't code php but I do have web developers in house. We might build our own CMS but that seems unnecessary. And to me it seems Joomla, Wordpress, and Drupal are overkill for my needs. Plus having multiple installations whatever... blah!

Maybe I'm wrong. Any suggestions, workflows, thoughts would be appreciated.

Thank you,

2 Answers

Edward C. Young
Edward C. Young
10,323 Points

Take or watch the Track on PHP Development. Pay close attention in the Database Foundations and the PDO Data Objects, then do the Following:

  1. Gather all Data Common to customers.
  2. Store that common data in a proprietary database(i.e your company database)
  3. Build a PDO based page, using Prepared Queries.
  4. Build only one Landing page, one Form Submission Page and other pages.
  5. Escape the output to the browser, in the particular places needed.
  6. All customers will see a professionally done page, outputting the data they supplied.

The only issue here is that the Prepared queries cannot output Customer ID's in the argument passing, ie:

index.php?id=nnn

because you don't want customer n=1 to look at customer n=400's page. To fix that, obfuscate the customer's id in the prepared query like so:

SELECT id, name, column1, market_type,other_columns FROM customer
WHERE id=nnn AND market_type='healthcare'

then pass the name as the Page argument, like so: (Yes nnn=id, but the Prepared statement is passed to server-side PHP, so code inspectors like me, will never realize you are supporting multiple customers, because they wont know that the prepared statement doesn't match by name.)

index.php?name=ACME

This will hide the customers from each other unless customer ACME knows customer ACME1 is using you as a Solution Provider, but they still will not know each others customer ID. If a visitor passes foo to name, he'll recieve an SQL error at which point PHP should die().

This approach gives up creative Flexibility, but makes Management Easier, and eliminates the need for a CMS all together

Wow thank you