[SGVLUG] Questions about CMS's

[Tom Emerson]

I've recently been asked to update a website that looks to be "mostly
hand coded..."  I'm sure whoever built it originally used some sort of
design tool, but there are some oddities about the site - at one
point, it looks like any references to "news" were globally massacred
and turned into a link, even in the word "newspaper"...

I'd like to use a proper CMS tool to maintain it going forward, even
though the site is 99% static.  The hosting company they use has
"wordpress" available, which appears to be very similar to movable
type, and thats my first question: what are the differences between
these two? (I've used MT for my own site, but I don't update it very
often)

I would also consider joomla since I use that a bit more regularly ;)

(and I know folks in the background are chanting "dru-pal, dru-pal, dru-PAL"...)

the main purpose of the site is to promote the products the company
sells (they are a distributor), so the text for the products comes
from a parent site (that does not use RSS).  I'd like to make it easy
to update the text content without having to worry about layout,
links, and making "global" changes with unusual side effects...

So, what would you suggest?  keep in mind I intend to use the current
site as a template, so the ability to import and update an existing
page layout is a plus.  The products they distribute are not updated
very often (maybe two years between updates?  yes, a very niche market
where the software doesn't need very many new "bells and whistles" to
keep up sales)