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easy-what ? |
| (short) introduction to content management systems |
Content management systems or CMS are those little things that can make your life really easier when you have to manage a website.
A CMS is a set of scripts that supports the creation, modification and deletion of the informations displayed on a website. Nowadays, CMS systems also allow to specify how the content is to be shown by using template mechanisms.
Today, a lot of professional products are available for a wide range of prices (Broadvision, Cofax, Documentum, Filenet, Microsoft CMS, Vignette ...).
Of course, there are also very good open source products such as RedHat CCM, Mambo, Midgard, Open-CMS, PHP-Nuke, Plone, Spip, Typo3, Zope and much (much) more.
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So, why another CMS ? |
| yet another "easy" thing ! |
That's probably because I am a lazy user and a crazy programmer ;-).
A few years ago I was trainee in an IT company and I was reponsible of the creation of a new Intranet. Then I did my first steps into the world of CMS's.
I made three simple observations :
- Commercial products for professional purposes are generally good but extremely expensive.
- Content management and template development of open-source java based CMS are generally rather complicated (not to mention installation procedures !).
- PHP open-source projects do often have an ugly approach of how to manage the content and how to make the distinction between content and presentation.
After a few weeks of analysis for the development of the Intranet, I decided to use a non-free open-source java based CMS : Jahia. What I found impressive and beautiful was the simplicity for the end-user to add, remove and modify pages and content without having to deal with a back-end interface. Time has passed, I did a great job at the IT company ;-) and completed the Intranet. But I still was thinking of a free CMS of that kind.
Well, I decided to make a CMS of my own which, I hope, will be considered as a "better" one. easy-CMS has been widely inspired from Jahia but : it is full open-source AND free (released under GNU/GPL), PHP based (so it doesn't need a dedicated server), and has this nice simple-user-without-content-management-knowledge approach.
I did my best to improve the architecture of the content management (fully object oriented) and to use the most appropriated tools for the templates (XML and XSLT).
To learn more technical details, feel free to browse the documentation pages.
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