When equipped with the right CMS, you can build a website that is fast, feature-rich, easy to deploy and manage. A user-friendly system will help you effectively separate content from the website layout and allow inexperienced community users to publish their own material. If you have a site that requires frequent updates but do not want to spend hours upon hours making the necessary changes, a CMS like phpWCMS can make your life much easier.

What is phpWCMS?

phpWCMS is an open-source, web-based CMS scripted in the widely used PHP server-side programming language. Like many open-source software applications, it uses a MySQL database to store all website data with the exception of converted images and uploaded files. phpWCMS is divided into a frontend and backend. The frontend is for presenting the site while the backend is only accessible to registered administrators and users. With backend access, members of your community can login and modify template settings, manage their own content and much more. The learning curve for phpWCMS is much shorter in comparison to other systems, making this software ideal for beginner and intermediate users. Ease of use and user-friendly features often make it the preferred choice over comparable systems like Typo3.

As a cross-platform application, phpWCMS runs efficiently on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X operating systems. In addition, the backend translates into 13 different languages including English, Danish, Dutch, Italian and Swedish.

phpWCMS Features

The phpWCMS software is extremely rich in terms of features. Below we have listed some of the most notable:

Unlimited page layouts - The built-in, customizable Page Layout Wizard allows you to mix and match elements to create as many page layouts as you want.

Unlimited templates – The Template Editor features support for custom HTML headers, JavaScript onload functions and CSS stylesheets that enable the creation of unlimited themes.

Simple content management - Building your site is made easy with numerous content parts. You articles and blog posts can have summaries, redirections and other parts that distinguish it from the layout.

Multiple WYSIWYG editors – The phpWCMS HTML editors give you the ability to build your site with little to no programming knowledge. In addition, such a wide variety ensures that your creation looks good in popular web browsers such as Internet Explorer, Firefox and Opera.

Multiple content parts - Content comes in many different variations and phpWCMS is able to support many. The software handles images, articles, multimedia files, newsletters, custom search forms, sitemaps, guestbooks and more.

Although phpWCMS is loaded with an array of useful features, it does not support a great number of add-on modules and therefore, it is not as flexible as more robust content management systems. For this reason, it is recommended for small to medium sized websites.

Where to find phpWCMS

As an open-source application, phpWCMS is free to use and can be downloaded from the official project website. In order to enjoy the benefits, you will need a web host that supports the software. Because the system has become extremely popular, it is becoming easier to find. phpWCMS is now offered in many web hosting packages as a one-click installation through control panels like cPanel and Plesk.

If you need a more effective way to manage your website content, Siteframe is one program that may be of interest. Siteframe is a lightweight content management system that gives you the ability to quickly build community-based websites. This user-friendly software allows a large group of users to send internal messages, share news stories and photos, participate in community activities and much more. Siteframe permits this functionality through an intuitive web-based interface in an environment where users do not require experience with HTML or complex server-side programming languages. Open-source and totally free to use, this CMS is often a first choice of beginners and advanced webmasters alike.

Features and Capabilities

There is a lot that can be performed with the Siteframe CMS. You can build a corporate intranet application, a blog or even a subscription based site. Siteframe is capable of dealing with wide range of content from articles and images to polls and custom URLs. This program enables the creation of a dynamic website that can be easily updated by you, the system administrator or other members of your staff.

The latest version of Siteframe is loaded with features. Some of the most notable include:

Enhanced security - Prevents community users from running malicious scripts and distributing spam.

Smarty template engine - This popular template engine lets you instantly enhance your site with a number of HTML and PHP-based themes.

Community-oriented GUI – Siteframe’s graphical user interface allows users to create folders that act as blogs and mini websites within the main community site. Administrators can easily manage each folder while users have the freedom to choose custom templates for their own web pages and folders.

Automated image handling – The most recent version of Siteframe automatically creates thumbnails of photos and also lets you change them to the size of your choosing. This provides added flexibility when designing pages and managing your content.

RSS support – This feature allows you to integrate content from other sites via RSS feeds. In addition, Siteframe provides RSS feeds on a per site, per folder or per tag basis, offering enhanced flexibility for sharing content throughout the community.

Ad Hoc pages – This is a unique feature that lets you create items that are not included as a part of the regular user-orientated content. This could be support pages or legal statements.

Administrative control – You can manage virtually every aspect of your site from the Siteframe administrative control panel whether its viewing reports, editing files or performing routine maintenance.

System Requirements

In order to get the most out of Siteframe, your server must meet the following requirements:

Apache 2.0 - Though it is speculated that Siteframe may integrate well with other versions of Apache, Apache 2.0 is the confirmed and recommended web server platform.

PHP5 - A server equipped with PHP5 is a must for running the Siteframe CMS. This has to do with many essential features that are not provided by other versions of the language.

MySQL 4.1 or higher – Siteframe thrives off functionality that was introduced in version 4.1 of MySQL. Though older versions may work, they are sure to lack the database features that make Siteframe such a powerful system.

PHP Nuke is responsible for many of today’s popular content management systems and phpWebSite is one of the them. phpWebSite began in 2001 as a fork of the original PHP Nuke CMS. It was released as open-source software under the GNU GPL and LGPL (Lesser General Public Licence), free to use, modify and redistribute. In a very short time, phpWebSite was implemented with functionality that gave the system its own identity apart from PHP Nuke. phpWebSite is now supported by a large community as well as a number of add-on modules that extend its functionality.

Common Usage

The phpWebSite application is mainly used by community groups and for educational purposes. While it is available to the public for other uses, the software’s primary focus is serving staff at Appalachian State University. In fact, phpWebSite was initially designed to make it easier for university staff to create and manage their websites. Over the years, the system has been greatly enhanced with features you will commonly find in other popular content management systems.

phpWebSite Features and Capabilities

PHP is a fully modular, customizable software package, allowing you to install, modify and update numerous components. Its customization is extended through a wide variety of themes and HTML templates. Although phpWebSite extensions typically consist of common features like photo galleries, blogs and bulletin boards, these elements don’t offer the functionality of standalone applications like Coppermine, WordPress and phpBB. Because many of phpWebSite modules are intended for university users, they tend to lack the features you would find in applications such as Joomla or Drupal.

By default, the phpWebSite CMS offers functionality that makes it useful in many situations. Some of its major capabilities include:

Content Creation and Management – phpWebSite’s built-in tools allows administrators and users to create, display and manage content on the system. This includes text, files, images links and other forms of content.

Content Organization and Navigation - With phpWebsite, you can easily organize and present your content in a way that is simple to access and mange.

Communication – phpWebSite is ideal for running a community-based side as the software enables communication through various mediums. This includes email, internal messaging and data interchange among other methods.

Configuration and Administration – As the website administrator, you have the ability to assign administrative privileges to staff and assign other permissions to users. phpWebSite allows you to effectively manage every member within the community.

Development – Because phpWebSite is open-source, anyone can write extensions to enhance the software. The integrated development tools allow you to set permissions for your internal developers to custom build modules for the system.

Presentation – phpWebSite offers a nice mix of pre-designed themes but there are many options for customization. If you are familiar with CSS stylesheets, you can design and incorporate your own templates. If not, there are several themes available on the web, ranging from free to premium.

phpWebSite Requirements

The features and user-friendliness of phpWebSite makes it a good choice for an open-source CMS. In order to get the best out of this software, you will need a server equipped with the Apache web server and PHP programming language. Though the PostgreSQL is supported, MySQL is recommended.