Six reviewed lightweight CMS plus a host of other suggestions!
There are many different content management systems out there on offer and there is a lot of variation in what they offer and what they can do so it's important to know what features the CMS that is right for your website should have. For most small to medium sized websites, a lightweight one will provide all the necessary implements without eating up an excessive amount of disk space. Also, if you can't find the blogging system/news publishing tool to fit your needs, you can always convert a lightweight CMS as many have blog publishing and commenting systems either as a core feature or an add-on, extension etc. By the way, the listed below are all available free of charge. However, if you're willing to shell out a bit for a really great (and brilliantly marketed) lightweight CMS, try Perch.
TYPOlight
TYPOlight is a CMS for small to medium-sized websites.
Notable Strengths and Features:
- Blogging or news system with comments already equipped with standard spam protection.
- Form generator which can send data via email or store data in a database.
- Built-in newsletter module.
- The TYPOlight Extension Repository contains a wide choice of additional modules to add to the funcionality of the CMS.
- Full-text search engine.
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Weaknesses:
- Not very well documented.
- Large parts of existing documentation in German.
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| Developer | Online Demo |
Frog CMS
Frog CMS is a truly lightweight CMS and made to be simplistic and flexible.
Notable Strengths and Features:
- Easy to design on it.
- Very light and so hence, fast.
- Uses standard PHP tags (rather than CMS tags) so developers will be comfortable working with the coding.
- Simple user interface.
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Weaknesses:
- Not very well documented.
- Blogging structure proves more difficult with larger weblogs. Cannot support larger websites.
- Developments absent although not officially.
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| Developer | Online Demo |
Radiant CMS
Radiant CMS is built on Ruby on Rails and is a lite CMS with capabilities similar to Frog CMS.
Notable Strengths and Features:
- Built on Ruby on Rails: easy for developers to extend it.
- Simple, easy to use user interface.
- A custom tagging language called Radius.
- Inspired by, similar look and feel as Frog CMS.
- Blogging/commenting, Google search bar, etc. extensions available.
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Weaknesses:
- Like Frog, it is limiting in its capabilities. For small sites only.
- Installing Ruby on Rails application is dissimilar to installing PHP ones.
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| Developer | Online Demo |
Cushy CMS
Cushy CMS is the first generation of lightweight hosted content management systems.
Notable Strengths and Features:
- Free, unlimited use with "Pro" upgrade optional.
- Extremely simple to use. The simplest.
- No installation required, Ruby on Rails, PHP, MySQL or otherwise.
- Produces pages that are standard compliant and search engine friendly i.e. with validator-friendly coding and meta tags.
- Uses FTP.
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Weaknesses:
- Not particularly dynamic.
- Security implications of allowing CushyCMS servers to store sensitive website login data such as your FTP details. Risque!
- This is hard to explain but this CMS cannot add pages straight from its interface. To create a new page you must login to webhost's control panel and create that page for CushyCMS to add and edit which is a bit of a hassle. So this is only good for static websites.
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| Developer |
Zimplit
Zimplit is a micro CMS which has traded the scalability of most CMSs for simplicity.
Notable Strengths and Features:
- Installation is easy, easy.
- Editing, changin and adding pages and content is super easy and interactive. You have an interactive screenshot of your page which you can edit like a Microsoft Word Document in any place you want. In the screenshot above, I'm editing the logo of the demo website to say "IceCaves". The menu and navigation is all at left which peels out to show more when needed.
- Attractive design, clever marketing..
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Weaknesses:
- The most minimal capability even for a lightweight CMS.
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| Developer | Online Demo |
Other Lightweight CMS Suggestions:
Comments
You could add up Habari - I tried it out, and it's actually really nice and simple
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Is Habari a lightweight CMS? o.O
I always thought it wasn't lightweight.
Password is just like your underwear. You have to change it everyday and make sure not to let anyone see it and use it.
LotusCMS seems pretty good as well.
I enjoy using e107 - it's pretty easy to figure out once you get to using it. It is also pretty easy to customize if you are knowledgeable with slight PHP/coding. And believe me I am NO expert!
Aurial.net|Blog|Stock Photos, Resources and More!
I tried Habari on their site, so I haven't played around with any of the backend stuff, but it seemed like a simpler version of Wordpress in a lot of ways.
I haven't really tried any of the others to be honest :P
@Leah - I guess once you master using one CMS for layouts/customization etc, it's pretty easy to navigate yourself around other ones.. the hardest thing is understand where the little snippets of code need to go, but once you've got that down, you're sorted :)
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I think Habari could count as a more medium-weight CMS because these are very simplistic.
Jenny-Jen-Jen :D
Bloggity: www.windymill.net
Web-Design Portfolio: www.jenny-aster.net
Haha. Tbh, I'm not really sure what qualifies as heavy, medium or light-weight.. haha
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