Is Alfresco easy to use to create websites?

[jazzer]

I am researching CMSs and am very interested in Alfresco. However, I am disappointed in the lack of documentation on how to use it to create a website without a team of java programmers.

In looking at Drupal or Joombla, they play up the ease of website creation and adding widgets or webscripts to a page. For instance, I need to add events calendars to my intranet site. The other systems have simple drag and drop funcionality, Alfresco seems to require that I write a java calendar and somehow insert it in the page. I need to be able to have access to many prebuilt widgets and page templates, not build them myself.

Either I'm missing something, or is Alfresco really for file management and not website creation?

Also, and very important, a post at blog.contenthere.net/2008/05/alfresco-and-e2cm.html states that the cost of Alfresco can be up to $60k per year for a large enterprise installation. Is this true?

[jpfi]

Hi,
first, yub 60k can be true in a large multi server environment and only when using Alfresco Enterprise.
To answer your question, no, you don't need to program a single of java code, but perhaps some lines of javascript and freemarker suing Alfresco Web Scripts: http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Web_Scripts.
But I'm not sure what you're really searching. Are you searching sth. like this: http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Alfresco_Dynamic_Website or perhaps http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/WSF.
Alfresco is more than a simple CMS like joomla or drupal. It is more generic and a ECM system where CMS (WCM) is only a module. But this means also, that Alfresco is sometimes a bit more complicated to use than joomla or drupal, it just depends what you want to achieve.
Cheers, Jan

[jazzer]

Thanks for the info, the Alfresco Dynamic Website sounds like just what I've been looking for. Unfortunately there is no indication as to when it will be released.

Does anyone know the timetable on ADW? If its a few months I can wait, otherwise I'll have to start looking for something else.