Anigozanthos

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:

• 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.
  
• 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.
  
• 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?

Google have recently blogged about their Chrome browser extensions. Their extensions are basically nothing more than regular web pages, just smaller, and with a bunch of new APIs to obtain the necessary functionality.

It's very similar to what Palm are doing with their new webOS - applications for the new Palm phone are written using HTML, CSS and Javascript.

I've never been much of a supporter of browser extensions. To me, they just add a lot of complexity and trouble to an already incredibly complicated application.

However, back in 2006 I thought that Opera should somehow make their then-new widgets the basis for extending functionality into the browser chrome. I still think Opera should do something like that.

Leveraging existing web development knowledge makes a lot of sense. I'm not convinced that Google's use of separate processes is really necessary. Just lightweight multi-threading so nothing blocks up.

As part of my research into consolidating my web sites, which has been concentrating on CMSs for the last couple of weeks, I've also been pondering how to manage my photo galleries.

This is a run-down the sort of features I've been thinking of:

• Lightbox style (shade the main page, pop the photo on top).
  
• Caption display.
  
• Prev/next.
  
• Display embedded EXIF data.
  
• Link geocoded image with Google Maps.
  
• No JS library dependencies.
  

None of the CMSs I've been looking at support such a gallery system. The closest were Quick.Cms and LightNEasy, both with standard Lightbox support. That is, lightbox style and caption support, but no prev/next or exif or geocoding support.

Well, today I've found the viewer that supports all the points I want: Lytebox, modified and extended. It's not perfect, as it has a dependency on ExifTool, and I would much rather use the built-in PHP EXIF/IPTC support. It looks like I only need to replace one function, though, so not much work there.

The real work will be integrating with whatever CMS I end up choosing, but this solves the largest piece of the puzzle.

It seems a bit of a coincidence, but my ISP has just announced an increase in the web space available for all their customers: 1GB up from 30MB! Awesome! What a nice ISP. No extra charges either.

With my plans for merging my web sites into one, and hosting my various photo galleries in one place, I'd been a bit worried about storage. Not any more!

Actually, I have four domain names registered with my ISP. Each of those gets 30MB. With the standard 30MB that means a total of 150MB storage is pooled and shared among all of them. i.e. A small site on one domain means more space for the rest.

Between my two web sites (my ISP and my.opera) and my three business sites, I'm currently using about 95MB. Two of those business sites I expect to expand soon (going from placeholder to actual pages). Then my site will grow too. 150MB would have been fine for a while, but I expect I would have filled it eventually.

1GB is going to be much more difficult to fill. I accept the challenge!

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.