I'm a big fan of Movable Type, an inexpensive blogging platform with a large user base. With a variety of plugins and some creative thinking, you can make it organize and publish a stunning variety of information. At the same time, it has such an easy-to-use administrative interface that a computer novice can learn how to post with minimal instruction. This make it an excellent content management tool for small businesses with limited I.T. budgets.

RightFields, a plugin by Movable Type guru, Kevin Shay, enables you to customize the entry screen to include custom fields. You can use these custom fields to solicit consistent information from the poster, validate the data, and then display and sort the results in templates however you would like.

For an example of RightFields in action, see our apartment rental page for Ridgefield Management. We used the RightFields plugin to gather the apartment building, apartment type, rent, deposit, and rental term. In the time that it took to write this entry, the administrator of the site posted all of her available apartments and re-published the site!