CMS Made Simple
| Installation |    |
| Built-in features | |
| Security management | |
| Performance | |
| Editorial Features | |
| Themes & templates | |
| Plugins & extensions | |
| SEO friendliness | |
| Multilingual support | |
| Ease of use | |
| Support community | |
| Publisher | : Cmsmadesimple.org |
| Latest version | : 1.6.6 |
| Platform | : PHP |
| License type | : GNU + GPL |
| CMS type | : Website publishing |
CMS made simple is an open source project, which allows developers to easily create websites. It is built in PHP and is used to make static and semi-static websites. The current version of CMS Made Simple does not support complete dynamic pages. As it name is, it helps developers or designers to design a website in very less time and within a few steps. Even people with very less technical knowledge of HTML or PHP can create powerful websites using CMS Made Simple.
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Main features
CMS Made Simple uses a modular approach and hence is reusable. It is used by numbers of developers and designers all over the world. It can host complex business websites, corporate applications to small personal blogs. CMS Made Simple offers a WYSIWYG editor; content editors can simply edit content without going deep into the HTML source code. CMS made simple offers several layout structures which help in easily editing the website continent and layout. It enhances reusability, which means one design can be used for other websites.
CMS made simple was released in July 2004 with version 0.1. Its popularity can be verified by the fact that after its release CMS made simple has been downloaded almost 750,000 times, currently this CMS has average 520 daily downloads. CMS Made Simple offers a number standard features like content search functions, versioning/editing of articles and a comprehensive WYSIWYG editor. Apart from its built-in functionalities, you can also use a number of other third party tools to enhance the capability of this CMS.
CMS made simple is based on PHP and is very easy to install. It also allows developers to easily integrate other PHP scripts in the website. This adds more power to web pages and help to manage dynamic content. It is user friendliness and the fact you don’t need in-depth knowledge of PHP to operate it, makes it very simple and easy to use for everyone. CMS made simple also has a good support community and help documentation in case somebody get stuck during installation or configuration this content management system.
Roadmap & Philosophy
We can expect CMSMS 2.0 by 2010 Q1 with some additional features like PHP 5.2, autoloader, centralized module templates, drag/drop page admin and more content management features. It is expected that CMS made simple will support multi languages in later versions.
Core developers: Ted Kulp, Robert Campbell, Samuel Goldstein, Morten Poulsen, Nuno Costa, Alberto Benati and many more.
Jude Vihervaara wrote:
The main thing with CMSMS is the two last letters – Made Simple. This CMS is really simple to use, at least when you compare it to Joomla or Drupal, which both can be real headaches to a newbie.
When I first tried CMSMS, I was using an old Mac G4 server and the load was too much for it. The server really was slow with it. But after moving to a webhotel, it was as fast as other sites. The old G4 is still serving me with dozen of WordPress blogs, few B2Evo blogs and phpBB forum with a 1000 members and it’s not slow at all, so CMSMS needs serious power from the server.
The plugins and extensions is the weak point of CMSMS, there’s not too much of them and more is needed. Same thing is with templates, but it quite easy to edit the themes taht are included in the package. I’ve done it few times, creating new layouts by editing the standard templates.
SEO friendliness is OK, even as a full time SEO worker I’d like to do bit more things bit easier, but I’m not complaining. So far the SERPS are pretty good.
In the multilingual support, my native language – finnish – is allways a challenge. And so it is this time too. About 80% of the interphase and manuals can be found in finnish and that is pretty nice. I know lot of things that I have read all in english.
Support community is ok, I’ve allways got an answer to my questions and my problems are solved.
If you really need a easy to use CMS for your team or small business – CMSMS is our choice. And it’s in version 1.6.x now, so it’s pretty new and young system. I believe it will be lot better in the future and it will have lot of templates and plugins and the ease of use will be lot better. I really can recommend CMSMS to you.
Sean Pace wrote:
I wasn’t too familiar with this CMS until recently when I ran across a site using it. I tried it out as a test for a client. At the end of the day it’s good to have but I did find a few flaws that I didn’t like. Overall I would say to give it a try. The best thing about this is the WYSIWYG editor feature. If you are new to webmastering or blogging in general, you may want to start off with CMS Made Simple.
Gman Markovsky wrote:
CMS Made Simple is very user friendly CMS i could say it one’s of best in support, SEO and editorial features. They have a lot of downloads 3/4 million and this also shows it popularity. A lot of plugins and themes that can make your website look professional. Overall i would say it’s a great CMS for newbie webmasters because of the ease of use.
Rahul Jain wrote:
CMS Made Simple is based on the Smarty template engine and builds on that foundation to create a solid offering that could be compared to the big names like Joomla and ModX.CMS is easy to use, works, and doesn’t get in the way of the site content.CMSMS is great. You can dump any layout or any content into it and it just works – creating content and laying out sites is much easier. If you know what you are doing you can do amazing things with the modules which are much more customisable than joomla. I think that in time CMSMS will eventually overtake Joomla for for functionality and power.
CMSMS really rewards people who know a little bit about HTML and CSS.Very easy to set up a basic site with a few static pages etc. Relatively easy for inexperienced users to add and edit content once the site has been set up. For designers with very little html/programming experience, smarty may be easy to pick up in the short term.
The module manager is very nice to use, as it lets you see all the modules that are available to you without having to visit another website; it’s all accessed through the admin panel.
Documentation as always could use a little work but it’s not that bad for basic CMSMS understanding. There is very little documentation if you which to go ahead and develop or customise your own modules. The community is generally active and most of the time very helpful, though because of the target market there are few highly skilled developers available for guidance.