The offers will be a fixed, simple format consisting of a title, 1 paragraph, price, date and photo. They will also need to be given a category to relate them to 1 particular destination. At any one time the site may have up to 40 offers, so this is not a vast amount of data.

Some of the static pages will need to pull in a couple of the fields from the offers, for example the page on China may pull in all the titles, dates and prices for the China offers.

I'm not really a backend person, but in the past I've hacked my own solution to this sort of thing in PHP with a flat file as a database. At the time, my thinking was just to avoid using MySQL because I'm not very experienced with it. Actually, in the end I think it was quite a good move because it made the site that little bit faster. But that previous system was quite a bit simpler than what I'm planning now - just a single page of offers with no real datastructure or relation to other pages.

This time my first thought was to use a pre-built CMS, maybe even something like WordPress (which I'm very familiar with) and mutate blog posts into offers. I can see how this can be done but it leaves the client with a rather over-complex backend interface. Also, for a travel agent site that may get a lot of hits, it would be adding at least 1 database call for a lot of the pages, just to pull in some very simple data.

Any advice on what to do in this type of situation? Should I be biting the bullet and getting my hands dirty with MySQL (which I keep avoiding - too many plates spinning), or can I expand my flat-file system. Or would a CMS be the quickest, simplest way to go?