What would be your best choice to allow the client to change text on the site, add news and be able to have under 50 items in a shopping cart. I was considering Wordpress, joomla, zen cart, cms made simple.

That all depends on what specific features they need in the shopping cart, and also whether they can understand how to use the application.

have you got a list of what they need?

There are mostly static pages. Some will have news areas which will need to change. As for the shopping cart, I'm not sure. It would have to be able to use standard payment options and processors (worldpay, paypal websites pro etc.)

What else would be on that list?

Zencart

Originally Posted by dreamz

There are mostly static pages. Some will have news areas which will need to change. As for the shopping cart, I'm not sure. It would have to be able to use standard payment options and processors (worldpay, paypal websites pro etc.)

What else would be on that list?

www.viart.com 's cart comes with an inbuilt CMS, news and lots of other things. For the shopping cart side it's a good idea to get a list of your clients actual requirements so you can deliver the right end product for them - most decent carts support worldpay/paypal and all the other popular payment gateways anyway.

Mybe you could make static webpages without any CMS. You can add news just by editing the news page (in a text editor / Dreamweaver / whatever you use). You can even make an RSS feed and edit it with a text editor as well, then wrap with FeedBurner for compatibility & stats. And then install a standalone shopping cart (in a separate directory) and insert the links in the static pages. I know that Avactis shopping cart can be integrated this way. You can even insert parts of storefront into any other page. You only need to make ALL pages with .php extension from the start, even if you don't insert PHP code there first. They have a tutorial on the site, take a look.
I think this way it would be more stable & simple than using some "all-in-one" CMS...

I have used Joomla, wordpress, and zen cart and so far i think joomla is the best. Joomla is free and Virtuemart is a free module/component for it. I am just getting in to virtuemart so I cant tell you with 100% certainty its better but i can definitely say I do not like Zencart at all and wordpress does not have near as much to offer as Joomla does. Downside to Joomla is that there is a pretty big learning curve because it is a very large and detailed CMS. Whatever you choose, good luck