Anigozanthos

Continued from Part 1...

Since my first post, I've reviewed some more flat-file CMSs:

LightNEasy was a surprising find. It has built-in support for photo galleries (with LightBox), a huge array of themes (which tells me it can't be hard making a new/custom one), plus plugins to integrate a flat-file discussion forum (Easy Forum) and flat-file wiki (Pawfaliki)! Wow - I haven't seen a wiki integrated anywhere else. A blog could be supported via its built-in News facility, but it doesn't support editing the post date/time stamp, nor are comments supported. Editing is via FCKeditor. The News facility supports multiple categories, but the static page system only goes to three levels deep. A bit shallow for my liking. Signing up for the LightNEasy support forum results in password emails going missing, and no response to follow-up requests. Followup: It seems they run a rather aggressive anti-spam system which was eating my messages. When I switched from my usual email address to my Gmail address, the messages got through OK.

Easy Forum deserves a bit more coverage. It's very simple. So simple, it's a bit difficult to use. It's also missing some basic anti-spamming-user-registration (eg a captcha). It does have a posting throttle to stop things getting out of hand. I couldn't work out how user banning works.

Pawfaliki is a very simple wiki. Each page is stored as a separate file. There is no UI to delete a page; it must be deleted manually from the file system.

FlatPress is primarily a blog, but also has support for a single level of uncategorised static pages. Editing is via a simple bbcode editor. It comes with a range of plugins, such as a calendar for your blog postings. Downloadable plugins include photo gallery support and TinyMCE editor support. There are quite a few themes available for download too.

fuzzylime is a truly impressive effort. It supports static content, multiple blogs, comments (optionally supported on blogs, photos and static pages), guestbooks, galleries, polls and mailing lists. Static pages all go into a big pool of pages, but per-page submenus can be created, thus giving the appearance of an infinite depth of content. The cost is that the relationships between static content pages need to be manually maintained and there is no way to get an overview of the site content. The blog support does not include a calendar. The default editor is plain text - HTML needs to be manually written in. There is a WYSIWYG editor available, but it needs to be downloaded through the menu system - and that wasn't working when I tried it. Since I couldn't download it, there's no way to tell what it is, although I suspect it's FCKeditor. The selection of templates is limited, and looks a bit complicated to make yourself. So far, this one seems to be the best fit for my new combined static web site, blog, and photo galleries. The fully automatic installer script has a bug that prevents correct operation, and there's a known bug handling the per-page submenus. Followup: The installer bug is now fixed.

JAF (Just Another Flat-file) CMS is a very simple setup, supporting a single uncategorised group of static pages, an uncategorised news item facility, and a gallery of photos without captions. Editing is plain text (manual HTML) - correction, it's using HTMLArea which uses browser sniffing that prevents operation in Opera. Easy enough to work around, but I think I'll give this a miss on principle. The HTMLArea code is more than four years old, JAF itself is over two years old. Other modules include a forum (which I couldn't get to work), guestbook and voting poll. Way too simple, feature-free and out of date for my liking.

Wait, there's more! I've run out of time today, so I'm posting this now. Part 3 (and maybe more) will follow, sometime. There's at least two or three other systems waiting for me to look at.