Free Flat-File CMSs Reviewed, Part 6
Saturday, 13. June 2009, 17:40:39
Deja Vu
During my recent failed attempt to get CMS Made Simple working with Gladius, I decided to revisit Lanius and give it a much more thorough kick around the tyres.
To recap, Lanius uses Gladius to provide a flat-file database, which is what I need for a few sites. This time I was able to easily figure out sections and categories. Lanius breaks down all your content into categories within sections. All your pages are then effectively third-level (section -> category -> content). Not much room to move
Enabling/disabling the various modules and functions was relatively easy. I was able to quickly strip it back to a configuration I'd be sort-of happy with for my personal and/or business use. However, there is still something about it I don't like. I think it's the inability to impose a hierarchical structure to the site. I'd have no problem putting all my pages into one big content bin, just so long as I could give the appearance of them being organised into a tree. Lanius won't let me do that, though.
More CMSs
First up, I've found CMS Matrix where I could search a lot of CMS products and hopefully find a few new prospects. Searching for "flat file" database, PHP, and Blog and Photo Gallery support quickly dropped the numbers to nine. Dropping the non-free, commercial or hosted options got that down to five. That left three I'd already evaluated (Lanius, GuppY, and phpCMS), and two new ones: ITcms and Pathos.
ITcms sounded very nice. Valid XHTML, accessible, lots of features. Shame it's all Italian and I couldn't see any English anywhere. Makes it a bit tricky for me to use! Pathos seems to have died. All up, nothing new from the matrix.
Returning to TinyCMS that I tried last year. I'd previously been unable to even bring up the admin page to do anything with it. Well, the author contacted me with a workaround, so I've been able to give it a better going over. Functionally, it supports a blog and static pages. No photo gallery management. There are rumors in the forums of some new modules in the works... In any case, there are still serious usability issues. For example, I couldn't figure out how to manage the blog. The blog support is provided as a module. The admin page says "To administer custom modules, please view the module's main page". Okaaay... how do I do that? There's no links! No documentation. It probably didn't help that the TinyCMS site had gone down, but I shouldn't need it to find the secret handshake that will let me perform basic site maintenance! I like the look of TinyCMS, the templating looks relatively easy to customise, I like the apparent modularity and the valid XHTML. Lots to like, I just found myself unable to figure it out. It needs more automation (less manual editing of files) and more pointing-and-clicking (less magic handshake URLs).
My Little CMS is a very new, still alpha CMS.
The same site that hosts the demonstration of CMS Made Simple also has a comprehensive list of Open Source CMSs. Of all those CMSs, not counting the ones I've already looked at, the following support either flat-file storage or ADOdb Lite:
While checking the list I bumped into a CMS that deserves special mention: ocPortal. This has a veritable kitchen-sink of functionality. I don't have space here - go to their site and have a read! The whole thing, from the install, the look, to the documentation has an incredibly professional and polished feel to it. No, it's not a flat-file CMS - MySQL required here!
And that's it! I still haven't checked out those wikis I've been meaning to. Soon?
During my recent failed attempt to get CMS Made Simple working with Gladius, I decided to revisit Lanius and give it a much more thorough kick around the tyres.
To recap, Lanius uses Gladius to provide a flat-file database, which is what I need for a few sites. This time I was able to easily figure out sections and categories. Lanius breaks down all your content into categories within sections. All your pages are then effectively third-level (section -> category -> content). Not much room to move
Enabling/disabling the various modules and functions was relatively easy. I was able to quickly strip it back to a configuration I'd be sort-of happy with for my personal and/or business use. However, there is still something about it I don't like. I think it's the inability to impose a hierarchical structure to the site. I'd have no problem putting all my pages into one big content bin, just so long as I could give the appearance of them being organised into a tree. Lanius won't let me do that, though.
More CMSs
First up, I've found CMS Matrix where I could search a lot of CMS products and hopefully find a few new prospects. Searching for "flat file" database, PHP, and Blog and Photo Gallery support quickly dropped the numbers to nine. Dropping the non-free, commercial or hosted options got that down to five. That left three I'd already evaluated (Lanius, GuppY, and phpCMS), and two new ones: ITcms and Pathos.
ITcms sounded very nice. Valid XHTML, accessible, lots of features. Shame it's all Italian and I couldn't see any English anywhere. Makes it a bit tricky for me to use! Pathos seems to have died. All up, nothing new from the matrix.
Returning to TinyCMS that I tried last year. I'd previously been unable to even bring up the admin page to do anything with it. Well, the author contacted me with a workaround, so I've been able to give it a better going over. Functionally, it supports a blog and static pages. No photo gallery management. There are rumors in the forums of some new modules in the works... In any case, there are still serious usability issues. For example, I couldn't figure out how to manage the blog. The blog support is provided as a module. The admin page says "To administer custom modules, please view the module's main page". Okaaay... how do I do that? There's no links! No documentation. It probably didn't help that the TinyCMS site had gone down, but I shouldn't need it to find the secret handshake that will let me perform basic site maintenance! I like the look of TinyCMS, the templating looks relatively easy to customise, I like the apparent modularity and the valid XHTML. Lots to like, I just found myself unable to figure it out. It needs more automation (less manual editing of files) and more pointing-and-clicking (less magic handshake URLs).
My Little CMS is a very new, still alpha CMS.
The same site that hosts the demonstration of CMS Made Simple also has a comprehensive list of Open Source CMSs. Of all those CMSs, not counting the ones I've already looked at, the following support either flat-file storage or ADOdb Lite:
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Lemon CMS - Super easy to install, but also very basic. Each page is its own HTML file and all the pages must be in the one folder. There is an automatically generated list of pages.
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miniCWB - "CWB" stands for Company Web Site and has a couple of business-oriented features such as a newletter with mailing list support. This is simple and easy to install, however it has several unfortunate showstopper bugs generating the correct path to images, so many images were not appearing at all. There was also some upper/lower-case issues - I suspect this CMS doesn't hang out on Unix-type filesystems too often! There is no WYSIWYG page editor - just a raw HTML editor. Pages are all stored in the one group, but any page can have any other page as a parent, implying an infinite tree depth. This tree is only apparent using a compatible skin. Of the ten skins bundled with the CMS, just one is such a skin.
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Toenda CMS - Simple, easy to install and use. Very basic site structure - I could only get pages one level deep. Has a photo gallery, news (blog), downloads, knowledge base articles (FAQs), and links. Has a nice clean appearance too.
While checking the list I bumped into a CMS that deserves special mention: ocPortal. This has a veritable kitchen-sink of functionality. I don't have space here - go to their site and have a read! The whole thing, from the install, the look, to the documentation has an incredibly professional and polished feel to it. No, it's not a flat-file CMS - MySQL required here!
And that's it! I still haven't checked out those wikis I've been meaning to. Soon?
WIDGETIZE