10+ lightweight cms options reviewed

Occasionally, I’ve found that fully featured CMS systems, aren’t always the best solution for particular projects. Sometimes, the client will only want to update a single page on their site, or they won’t be prepared to shell out the dough on a full fledged, full integrated CMS build. Other times, you may find that bigger CMS systems are just overkill for the clients needs.  Fear not. There are a wealth of good, yet lightweight CMS systems out there on the web that perfectly solve those problems, and are (particularly) easy to get up and running with. I’ve been collecting these in my bookmarks for a while, and they deserve their own post – so without further ado:

MojoMotor

URL: http://mojomotor.com/

Price: £31.97 per site, self-hosted

Language: PHP

Recently launched from the guys behind ExpressionEngine, MojoMotor bills itself as ‘The Publishing Engine – that does less’.  - and Less is More right? It is built on PHP, and allows you to define in your templates different regions which you would like editable. When these have been defined, and the software installed, MojoMotor comes along and replaces those areas with a WYSIWYG rich text editor, allowing your client to easily update the text in question. If for whatever reason the site grows or becomes unmanageable, there’s also a handy way to export your existing templates to ExpressionEngine, with their built in export tool.

A number of tags can be used to build dynamic small sites with MojoMotor, and alternative templates can be applied to different pages, allowing you to change both the look and feel and the HTML which is generated on different pages. The front end management section is well designed, tidy and accessible for your clients, who will find it easy to navigate around, and use on a day to day basis. A great little piece of software, that won’t cost you an arm and a leg to get up and running with.

PageLime

URL: http://pagelime.com/

Price: Free, Although variety of commercial plans, Hosted

Language: Works with all code types.

PageLime is a hosted solution, which exists on PageLime servers, however they do offer a self hosted version which is available on request. As with MojoMotor, editable regions are defined using CSS classes, although PageLime requires the extra step of adding your FTP details, and defining where the home page is via their built in FTP browser. I’m not sure how comfortable I am with giving my FTP details to a third party, particular considering they are going to have to be stored there for subsequent site editing.  One benefit however of being hosted on your behalf, is that it is not reliant on your existing server architecture, and works with a multitude of server side languages.

Logging in and setting up a PageLime account was a straightforward process, made all the more simple with the integration with OpenID.  They have a separate process for uploading images, which lets you select multiple new images and store them in a gallery, prior to their insertion on the page – which is a nice touch if you’ve a particularly image heavy site. Resizing can also be done in the browser, and aspect ratios are maintained, preventing your client from producing some hideous squashed mess.  PageLime are also one of the few sites that I’ve noticed that have included iPhone support in their offering, a much welcome feature that can be used for extra brownie points from your clients. :)

Perch

URL: http://grabaperch.com/

Price: £35 per site,  self hosted

Language: PHP

Perch is a product from the clever folks at EdgeOfMySeat.com, and I first was made aware of Perch directly from Drew McClelland, at a FOWD talk in Belfast. It is one of the more extensible solutions for a lightweight CMS, and is as much of a framework, as it is an out of the box solution. That doesn’t take away from it however, it just means that if you want to go the extra mile, there are some bits and bobs you can tap into to provide that flexibility. If you need a site that is both easy to modify, and yet doesn’t overwhelm end users, Perch is a great fit.

Out of the box Perch has a number of great little features. For example, it now supports branding , allowing you to customise the look and feel of the backend to match your client(s) design.  Other benefits include, the frontend code generated is completely custom, supporting HTML, XHTML, HTML5 or whatever, and  there is no footprint left at all from the CMS, and images are automagically resized to dimensions specified in your template, meaning you don’t have to worry about clients messing those up in your designs.

Surreal CMS

URL: http://surrealcms.com/

Price: Free, with commercial plan @ $25 a month, hosted

Language: Works with all code types.

Another lightweight CMS, with a heavyweight feature set, is Surreal CMS. Like some of the others mentioned here, Surreal uses CSS to define editable regions in your templates for both text and image based content. It also supports multiple sites from the same admin panel – (3 if you are on the free plan) – unlimited on the commercial plan. It is firmly lining itself up against CushyCMS, (previously mentioned here)  with documentation on how to port across an existing Cushy site, and being exactly three dollars cheaper a month.

Other interesting features that Surreal have managed to integrate are Analytics – tapping into the Google Analytics API to allow your clients to see their Google data from within the application, thereby eradicating the need for them to either learn, or need logins to Google. Smart.  As for the content itself, a full revision history is held for your clients to see how a page has changed over time, and potentially revert back to prior copy. Images are also well catered for with resize, crop and flip tools built all into the web admin. Overall, a well polished solution that will suit many small site owners.

Get Simple

URL: http://get-simple.info/

Price: Big Fat Free! – self hosted.

Language: PHP

GetSimple is an XML based lightweight CMS, and offers a variety of useful features to designers and developers alike, and running on XML files, requires no relational database structure to get up and running. True to its word, for me Get Simple took a mere matter of minutes to get up and running.  Those of you familiar with WordPress will recognise some borrowed concepts in their template hierarchy, and indeed in some of the method names in the code. An external functions.php also provides additional extensibility for those of you who know their way around PHP.

Some welcome SEO features include the generation of sitemaps, and the easy editing of keywords and tags associated with each page. Its almost idiot proof as well, with beautifully architected undo features, saving you time, and providing a much friendly user interface.

Simple CMS

URL: http://www.simplecms.com/

Price: Free, with commercial plans, hosted

Not to be confused with its neighbour (above) Simple CMS is a hosted solution which again uses FTP for accessing your client sites. This time however, we are assured a bit more on the security side of things, at least in their marketing documentation, which states that information entered into Simple CMS is protected by 128 bit SSL encryption.

Unlike some of the other solutions, Simple CMS doesn’t dictate the classname standard which you use to define the editable regions. A smart move, considering many of the sites that developers create may have different patterns. This saved me a bit of time in editing code, as I could simply define different editable classnames for different sites. You don’t even have to use the classname approach – if you prefer, you can also define regions using comments, which in some cases, makes them stand out more in Dreamweaver or other code editors.

Wolf CMS

URL: http://www.wolfcms.org

Price : Big Fat Free!

Language: PHP

Distributed under the GNU, Wolf CMS is an open source CMS that is gaining significant ground in the open source community. It’s core value is to be lightweight, and flexibile. It is a Fork of the popular CMS Frog (reviewed previously). Users who want to get off to a rolling start, can do so quickly, and Wolf has also a number of themes being actively developed if you don’t want to start from absolute scratch.  There is now built in plugin support for the frontend, giving developers access to the core functionality to build upon, which no doubt will help the project gain momentum.

Flexible templating is core to Wolf’s offering and developers looking to setup a simple CMS will find both the code, and user interface clean and simple to use.

RazorCMS

URL: http://www.razorcms.co.uk/

Price: Big Fat Free

Language: PHP

SiteManagr

URL: http://designelemental.net/sitemanagr

Price: Big Fat Free!

Language: PHP (CodeIgniter based)

SiteManagr is a simple open source CMS built on top of CodeIgniter, a PHP MVC framework that facilitates more rapid development paths.  Dan King is the man behind the code, and my what a stellar job he has done on SiteManagr, it really is a great little product, both from a design, UI and code perspective.  The design borrows heavily from WordPress, as does some of the structure and layout behind the scenes, but this only allows those already familiar to get up and running that bit quicker.

Support for Events, Media, and Analytics are included out of the box, and the install process took a mere couple of minutes once you had the username and password for MySQL, away it went and installed everything you need to get up and running.

Pyro CMS

URL: http://pyrocms.com/

Price: Big Fat Free! (Open Source)

Language: PHP (CodeIgniter based)

PyroCMS is another CMS based on the excellent CodeIgniter framework, it is an active project, with frequent updates – which is good to see considering so many open source solutions fall off the wagon.  Created by the marvelous Phil Sturgeon, you can expect the same sort of code quality that exists in parts of Expression Engine.  Extensibility is apparent for those of you who want to get your hands dirty and create a module.  For those of you that simply want to get up and running with a template, and get it integrated, Pyro allows this via the designers guide.  You only really need worry about the basic tags  in your templates – and for anything else, developers would be right at home.

Notable Mentions…

The following are additional extras that I found on my travels:

http://www.skybluecanvas.com/ –  Free! PHP based, no file store, Plugin API, extensibility.

http://www.zimplit.com/index.html – Free! Hosted, Commercial Options available.

http://www.websitebaker2.org/en/home.php – Free! (Open Source), PHP based, MySQL, IIS not fully supported

http://dev.ameoto.com/whitecrane – Free! – Useful as a lightweight WIKI solution, No Db required.

http://www.pluck-cms.org/?file=kop1.php – Free! (Open Source) Supports blogs, modules and themes. PHP

http://cmsfromscratch.com/ – Free! (Open Source) PHP, mix of includes and template approach.

http://snewscms.com/ – Free! modular, PHP based cms, lightweight with commercial template shop.

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