Looking for easily cusomizable CMS?

**NickNameDrive** · 07-31-2010, 07:35 PM

Hi everyone!

Looking for light and easily customizable Open Source CMS for the website, tried many, no luck so far. Just wondering maybe someone can advice a good one that would meet my needs.

Lots to read, but I tried to make myself clear.

Here's what I'm looking for:

A CMS that uses MySQL (for security reasons), PHP based for the site that is HTML based (will tell server to look for php in html).

A CMS that defined areas of editing in particular pages without interfearing with the architecture of site. No need for CSS editing, plaggins (such as search, comments and so on), just simple html urls with defined editing areas.

CMS where I can customize the editing area as a whole with html tags and then make it as an element (i.e. article).

For example, different elements such as news, articles and so on, have predifined areas inside html(php) file. When user views it, php server retreaves relevant text from MySQL. When I log in into Admin panel, I have a number of pages and elements that are available for editing with simple WYSIWYG, you can add/delete those pages and elelments. Each element is wrapped in my HTML and behaves accordingly.

In my search, one who came close was Onapage CMS (google it if interested), but it has many buggs and security issues.

Looked at many, most are not easily customizable and come with already predefined elements with predefined behaviours, such as posts in Wordpress, articles in Joomla.

Is there a CMS that recongnizes such thing as "editable pages", where they can be grouped (in admin pannel for easier use not like categories in WP). And such thing as "element" where I can write html for each element, one element can be inside another (for instance a picture element inside article element). Picture element because, unlike any WYSIWYG insert picture, this element is wrapped in html for certain behaviour, such as "zoom on picture".
Elements can be grouped and named and attached in admin panel to certain page or group of pages.

Building templates for WP or Joomla seems to difficult to me and many features are still predefined there anyway, like admin panel. And it is html urls what I need.

Please advice me on this, or drope the link for a candidate that you think ticks the boxes! Thanks to everyone!

I hope this is clear enough.

P.S. Would that be difficult to build it myself? What level of PHP, MySQL and JS it would require, taking into account that there are number of Open Source progs like TinyMCE to simple thing out?

**traq** · 07-31-2010, 07:54 PM

Building a CMS yourself is complicated. Simply because you don't have a good idea of what's involved, I can guess that it would probably be too difficult.

I like and use concrete5. It's simple to use from both the front end of the website and from "behind the scenes" (e.g., editing the code).

Making customized themes (which is what you need to do to use your own html template pages) is more complicated, though it's far simpler/more accessible than trying it in something like joomla.

As far as recognizing php inside the html page, you can do this to a certain extent, but it's not the best way: concrete (and most CMS's) use an MVC programming approach: content, layout, and processing are all separated. For example, if you have a page with a contact form, the php code for processing the form would not be on the same page as the form itself (and probably wouldn't work correctly if it was); it would need to be integrated with the CMS separately in order to work.

Searching "onapage," I only find an unfinished blog. Is that what you're referring to?

**NickNameDrive** · 07-31-2010, 08:03 PM

about "onepage", yeah i guess, that's what it looked like

I may be prepaired to drope html urls, as long as CMS is the one i need.

Will check concrete5 later on, thanks.

**traq** · 08-01-2010, 12:54 AM

by "html urls" do you mean www.example.com/directory/file.html as opposed to "pretty urls" like www.example.com/category/page ?

**mburt** · 08-01-2010, 02:39 AM

Hm it's still possible to have "htm" or "html" url endings if you really wanted to (using Apache's mod_rewrite module). But overall it doesn't make a huge difference. It might be more ideal to drop file extensions all together using mod_rewrite.

http://www.yourhtmlsource.com/sitema...rewriting.html

**NickNameDrive** · 08-02-2010, 10:20 PM

Originally Posted by traq

by "html urls" do you mean www.example.com/directory/file.html as opposed to "pretty urls" like www.example.com/category/page ?

Yes actually pretty urls will do just fine. It's just that current site is in htmls. But going with php and pretty urls is not a problem.

To continue my request...

I have found GetSimple CMS (XML based but seem secure enough), that almost does it for me, however, there's only one editalbe area inside one template page, that limits its ability to include extra elements within that area, as i described in the starter post.

For instance there're two types of news, that are separated on the page by design, which makes it imposible to use GetSimple CMS's WYSIWYG to edit them.

Any other ideas for flexible lite CMSs?

**traq** · 08-03-2010, 01:43 AM

Did you not like Concrete? There are lots of themes that can be used with it - maybe a dozen or two that are free - and creating your own is not too difficult.

About the urls: Concrete can use either "pretty" or normal urls. In fact, it first checks if a url points to a real directory or file, and if so, goes to that page instead of trying to redirect it through the CMS.

Here's an article that reviews some other "lightweight" CMS's.

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A concern about getsimple cms (and I've never used it, this is just my reaction after looking at a few pages on their site):

XML is absolutely not more secure than MySQL. In fact, xml files are completely accessible unless you take measures to secure them (such as storing them below the site root, or in a directory protected via .htaccess) - web browsers display xml pages just as easily as html pages. If getsimple does secure its xml (and I couldn't tell - the home page says "Secure!" but doesn't offer any explanations), then it may be fine; but it's another layer of complexity and presents another opportunity for security "cracks." Even more so if you have to configure any of that manually.

XML is absolutely not faster than MySQL. No way. The difference might not be noticeable (to humans) for basic, low-load operations - like storing and accessing static page content on a small site - but it's not faster. Not even equal. Especially if you need to do more involved searches or modifications to the XML tree, such as would be needed if you were running a larger site, a forum, or had content that varied depending on the logged-in user, etc.

The only advantage XML has (in this case - XML is very useful for other applications) over MySQL is that you don't need to pay a web host for an account that includes MySQL.

Again, I've never used this particular CMS. I didn't look at the code. However, on the surface, their claims don't seem to make sense.

Most CMS's use a database; that's simply because it's the very best tool for the job.

**Beverleyh** · 08-03-2010, 12:05 PM

Concrete5 looks really nice traq - I watched the video and there are so many useful features!
Do you know if those come as standard (such as the form submissions/survey) or as additional plugins?

**traq** · 08-03-2010, 02:29 PM

Lots of it is standard (forms, surveys, a photo gallery, more (including straight html content blocks w/o wysiwyg)) and quite a few plugins and themes are free. Some (notably their ecommerce solution) are paid. You can set up a demo on their site and try it out, and look through the "marketplace" to see what themes/plugins are available.