In this article, we shall attempt to compare TextPattern and WordPress and see which one emerges victorious.

Before proceeding further, a short disclaimer: the division of this comparative review under multiple headings does not essentially have a logical explanation – I’ve simply attempted to compare it using four basic, but very important, categories, functionality and usability, mode of operation, extensions and plugins and finally, community and support.

Furthermore, I guess many users of WP and TXP will either agree or disagree with my views. To be honest, using a particular CMS also requires a certain amount of personal choice, what might work for me, may not work for you, and vice-versa. Differences in opinion are always welcome!

So without further ado, let us begin with our comparison.

Functionality and Usability

When it comes to functionality and usability, WordPress seems to win easily. While this does not mean that TextPattern is, in any way, less functional than WordPress, WP simply beats TXP in terms of ease of use! With the advent of version 3.x and higher, WP now boasts of a super organized administrative panel that lets you manage your website with ease. Don’t believe me? Take a look at WP’s admin panel. ‘Dashboard’, ‘Posts’, ‘Pages’, ‘Settings’ – which of these sections are not self-explanatory? Customizing the blog becomes a matter of few clicks. Take a look at the ‘Settings’ page of both the CMSes.

WordPress Settings Page

On the other hand, TextPattern’s administrative panel, though equally capable and powerful, seems ‘outdated’ in comparison to that of WordPress. Of course, TXP is equally robust in its admin panel, but overall the interface is not as easy to use and may even be confusing for beginners.

TextPattern Settings Page

Availability of Custom Plugins/Extensions and Themes

Apart from ease of use, the next thing that defines any piece of software is the availability of extensions for it. However, more often than not, there is a spiral between ‘ease of use’ on one hand and ‘extendability’ on the other. For instance, when it comes to mobile operating systems, Android is more popular than Samsung Bada. While this does not demerit Samsung Bada itself, Android’s popularity can be attributed to its ever-growing app market, which in turn is increasing because developers take an interest in it due to its easy extendability and wide usage, which ensures their efforts will not go unnoticed. Again, due to developers’ keen interest, the apps keep growing, and the users keep coming to Android.

Both WP and TXP support themes and templates as well as multiple plugins and extensions. However, WP has more themes and plugins then TXP. While this may or may not prove WP’s superiority, it surely plays its role in contributing to WP’s user base. Since many commercially viable tech blogs and websites are powered by WordPress (not to mention the millions of blogs at WordPress.com and Blog.com), it is but natural that WP has a large number of themes and plugins. Certain providers, such as WooThemes, offer themes for both WP and TXP. Yet, in this case too, WP dominates TXP in terms of the number of available themes.

If you have exemplary coding skills, fret not! You can easily tweak TXP and design your blog or website the way you wish to. But if you are an end user just looking to get a blog or website up and ready with as little technical expertise as possible, WP should be your safest bet!

Mode of Operation

Modus Operandi is by far the most debatable topic when it comes to comparing any two CMS’s, let alone WP and/or TXP.

To begin with, WordPress comes with a WYSIWYG Editor that makes editing posts and articles extremely simple.

WYSIWYG Editor in WP

TextPattern, on the other hand, has an equally awesome (though not so end-user friendly, as it takes some ‘getting used to’) editor, which can do almost anything you want it to, but will surely leave many beginners confused. In TXP, Textile and other related features can either be your best friends or your worst enemies.

Article Editor in TXP

In the admin back end as well, you will notice that mundane tasks such as updating the CMS, installing themes/plugins, or even navigating the back end – all seem easier on WP rather than TXP for a novice. However, the confusion vanishes once you get accustomed to the interface.

Community and Support

A CMS is only as good as its user base. Both TXP and WP have a good and fairly active community and many forums where you can seek support and advice.

In terms of documentation, TXP seems to win outright. WP is well documented, but it comes nowhere close to beating TXP – apart from the usual website, TXP also has its own User Documentation Website and another TXP Resources site.

Speaking of support, WP is updated on a more frequent basis as compared to TXP. However, this can be interpreted either way – supporters of WP will consider the frequent updates as higher level of activity at their developers’ end, while supporters of TXP can attribute the lesser updates to a sign of maturity of TXP in itself.

To sum it up

Before coming to a conclusion, let us recap each CMS’s pros and cons:

TextPattern:

Pros:

• Textile is a wonderful component, and if you get used to it, you will never, ever, miss WP.
• You can tweak your website as much as you want. There is negligible encapsulation done.
• Extensive documentation.

Cons:

• Admin back end looks outdated.
• Interface confusing for beginners.
• Lesser number of themes/plugins (as compared to WP)

WordPress:

Pros:

• Perhaps the easiest CMS ever
• Several themes/plugins
• Excellent update mechanism

Cons:

• WP is intended to power only one blog at a time (unless you’re using WPMU)
• With plugins/extensions, it may becomes bloated
• Editing article meta data is difficult
• Notorious for frequent security bugs and issues

And the Winner is…

As I stated above, using (or not using) a particular CMS is a matter of personal preference too. More often than not, our choice for a CMS is governed by our needs (and, perhaps, bias towards a personal favorite).

WordPress and TextPattern are both great at what they do! If you need a CMS just to power a blog or a small website, look no further than WordPress. If, on the contrary, you wish to run multiple blogs, or prefer to tweak your articles before posting them (or simply like to do things the geeks’ way), TextPattern might be your ideal solution. In simple terms, TXP should be chosen if you wish to define the dynamics of your website just as if you were ‘programming’ software.

Have you used WP and/or TXP earlier? Do share your experiences with us in the comments!

Content Management Systems meant for wiki websites, too, like wiki sites themselves, need to strike the right balance between robustness on one hand and ease of use on the other. In this article, we take a look at some of the most popular wiki CMSs out there!

1. MediaWiki

Who doesn’t know Wikipedia? MediaWiki is used by Wikipedia as well as many other projects of Wikipedia’s parent organization Mediawiki Foundation. If you’re looking for a CMS for your wiki website, MediaWiki should be your safest bet! Not only is the CMS powerful, it is also very versatile and is ideal for any sort of wiki website.

MediaWiki

2. DokuWiki

DokuWiki is meant for developer workgroups, collaborating teams and small enterprises. As a CMS, it restricts itself mainly to documentation websites. The syntax is powerful and creation of structured texts is simple. Further more, DokuWiki does not need any database to run on as it stores all its data in plain files.

DokuWiki

3. PhpWiki

PhpWiki is another versatile wiki CMS. Unlike DokuWiki, it uses databases to store the information and is therefore, a slightly bulkier CMS. If you are looking for a nimble wiki CMS, PhpWiki might not suit your purpose. However, overall the CMS is a worthy competitor to all the others in the game.

PhpWiki

4. PmWiki

PmWiki attempts to bring the WYSIWYG approach to wiki websites. In general, you do not have to employ extensive knowledge of HTML in order to develop a website using PmWiki. Indeed, such features make PmWiki ideal for users who are not well-versed in HTML. On the downside, PmWiki’s update frequency has been erratic in the past.

PmWiki

5. TikiWiki

TikiWiki is known to offer many features ‘out-of-the-box’, such as setting permission levels for even the home page. It is loaded with numerous features, many of which might leave even the most experienced user overwhelmed. Currently standing at version 8.1 (stable), TikiWiki is a very popular CMS for wiki sites. It also features a bug/issue tracker mechanism as well as native support for RSS feeds and Calendar/Productivity addons.

TikiWiki

6. WikkaWiki

While WikkaWiki may not be known due to its modest feature set, it is one of the swiftest CMSs coded in PHP to date. Its speed and ease of use are remarkable, and if you plan to create a small wiki site that may not require heavy CMSs, you should consider WikkaWiki as an option. It uses MySQL databases to store information.

WikkaWiki

7. JAMWiki

JAMWiki is a JAVA clone of MediaWiki. Thus, it uses the same syntax as MediaWiki and is one of the leading wiki CMSs coded in JAVA.

JAMWiki

8. Enterprise Wiki

Confluence Enterprise Wiki is an enterprise CMS that targets teams, workgroups and other collaborative entities. It is a paid CMS – for a website with 11-25 users, you’ll have to shell out $800. You can also opt to host it on their servers, for a monthly hosting fee. In any case, Confluence is an option mainly for enterprises and is definitely not the CMS for your not-for-profit website.

Confluence Enterprise Wiki

9. Canvas ColdFusion Wik

Canvas ColdFusion Wiki is a CMS built using Model-Glue. It keeps track of all the editing and revisions performed on each page and is a decent CMS for teamwork.

Canvas ColdFusion Wiki

10. XWiki

XWiki offers a generic platform for developing wiki websites. It is built using JAVA and is licensed under the LGPL open source license.

XWiki

11. TiddlyWiki

TiddlyWiki is a unique concept in its own right. In fact, it is not even a full-fledged CMS. It is a single file, that brings to you all the characteristics and functionality of a wiki (including the style sheets, editing, saving, searching, tagging, etc.). Since it is nothing more than a single file, it comes with the added advantage of portability – you may upload it on your web server, copy it on to your USB drive or email it to your friends.

TiddlyWiki

12. DekiWiki

MindTouch DekiWiki is another enterprise solution. It aims to boost the productivity and efficiency of enterprises by offering a simple and non-interfering CMS.

MindTouch DekiWiki

13. ScrewTurn Wiki

Don’t let the name fool you! ScrewTurn Wiki is a fast, powerful and simple ASP.NET wiki engine. It is free and open source (commercial licenses are also available). The installation process is straight-forward and ScrewTurn Wiki has also been localized into multiple languages.

ScrewTurn Wiki

14. TWiki

TWiki is an enterprise collaboration platform and knowledge management solution. It is a structured wiki CMS that can act both as a groupware solution or a collaborative resource over the internet or intranet. TWiki’s niche lies in the fact that it is backed by a massive gallery of plugins/extensions.

TWiki

With that, we come to the end of this round-up. If you’ve used any/all of the above CMSs, do share your experiences with us!

P.S. You will notice how by the end of the article I slowly drift into the favor of WordPress (even when I won’t mention this openly). After all, WordPress rocks!

So, What is Pligg?

I know, I ended up pushing all my energy into my introduction which resulted in the major question being left unanswered. So, let me bite my tongue and introduce you to the definition of Pligg.

Pligg is an Open source Social Networking Content Management System (CMS) Combining social bookmarking, blogging, and syndication and a democratic editorial system enables users to collaboratively submit and vote articles. It was influenced by the extremely popular English technology site Digg, where when a user submits a news article it is placed in the “upcoming” area until it gains sufficient votes to be promoted to the main page. – Wikipedia

The above definition of Pligg really wraps up everything that can be said about Pligg. While WordPress was solely launched as a CMS for blogging purposes, Pligg on the other hand was launched as a social networking Content Management System. It has been designed to handle multiple authors who can be registered users controlling the website’s content. Those who know Digg (almost all of us do) might have already figured out Pligg’s initial purpose. Although the uses of Pligg have evolved in recent years yet the voting system remains the backbone for Pligg.

Features of Pligg

There isn’t much about Pligg so I don’t want to push lot of useless content in this article. Pligg is still growing. Their Wikipedia Page isn’t complete yet! To give you an example - Pligg.in is a news site which nowhere deals with Pligg although it uses Pligg as its backend.

Let us go through the features of Pligg before we jump over to the Pligg Showcase:

• Voting - Well, that is the obvious feature of Pligg so I do not need to discuss more of this. Although I will like to specify that Pligg also offers “5 star” voting system other than the Digg like voting system.
• User Profiles - Pligg lets users create their own profiles thus giving them the much required personal feeling. One can view other profiles, add others as friends, check what others are voting for and a lot more.
• Private Messaging - One can use the private messaging feature of Pligg for private communications.
• Groups - Like minded people can create groups where they can share stuff that will be appreciated by all.
• Module System - Like WordPress Plugins feature, Pligg has Module System which can be utilized by users to add extra features to their Pligg based websites.
• Smarty Templates - Website designed can be changed by using Smarty Templates which are more or less like WordPress templates. They won’t affect the backend of your website and will just change the front look of your Pligg based website.
• Easy Upgrades - Like WordPress, Pligg offers automatic upgrades and easy installation features thus making it more user-friendly.
• RSS Feeds – I guess I don’t need to explain this. Pligg offers its own RSS Feeds system which can be used by visitors of that particular website to keep themselves updated with latest updates from that Pligg based website.
• Multilingual Support - Pligg supports multiple languages thus making it widely available for users from other countries. Also, you can join the Pligg Translator Group to help them add your country in Pligg if it isn’t already present.

Suggestions for Pligg

Although Pligg seems to have some future, they still have a lot of room for improvement. The below suggestions are solely my thoughts and must not be misunderstood.

• I am not sure why this exists but Pligg’s About Page has “Advertise Here” sections just above the footer. I mean why is a Content Management System looking for ads like a regular blog would? Also, they charge only $70 per month. Well, does this mean that they aren’t famous? Really, Pligg, remove these “Advertise Here” images right away.
• Free up some of the modules. I was checking out the Pligg’s Pro section and there were modules that just amazed me. Don’t get me wrong. They didn’t amaze me due to their features. They did so because they were charging for modules that only offered basic functions. Like the Twitter Module is worth $23.99! I mean why would I spend that amount of money for Twitter integration. If Pligg wants to stand against the best CMS then they got to give away stuff for – FREE!
• Expand yourself, please. Pligg, as a community, needs to start working in order to expand their reach. I have so many webmaster friends who know nothing about Pligg. Why is that? They are failing somewhere for sure. They must re-think their marketing strategy to improve their reach.

I have a lot more to tell them but I would rather give them time to improve. They still have a lot to learn and a long way to go.

The Showcase

As is the case usually, I cannot let you guys go away without an inspirational showcase of websites that run on Pligg. Believe me, there is lot of niche Digg like websites that have a stronghold in their regions. Here we go …

1. Ball Tribe

2. Biz Sugar

3. Blog News

4. CG Digg

5. Community Radar

6. CSS Leaf

7. Cute A Holic

8. Dealigg

9. Design Float

10. Design Poke

11. FAQPal

12. Furryne

13. Fuze News

14. FWISP

15. Graphic Design Links

16. Mascota Tube

17. Motatagz

18. Open Faves

19. Snoogle News

20. Sphinn

1. Expression Engine

Expression Engine is one of those CMS that is easy to use. Within few minutes of testing it, you will already know the basic functions and will be able to play with them right away. This CMS is very flexible and creating content should be much more than easy. The templating system shows you immediately the changes you make and the last-generation caching system minimizes the database usage, which means faster loading times not only for you, but also for your visitors. Another advantage Expression Engine offers is the option to embed and run PHP directly in the templates, similar to the widgets from WordPress.

Expression Engine allows you to have multiple sites with just one installation. The caching system I was telling you about earlier keeps the site running fast because it stores database queries in the memory and reduces the database connections when web pages are generated. The license has to be paid only once and ranges from $99 for the “Freelancer” pack to $299 for the largest pack.

2. Business Catalyst

Business Catalyst is an Adobe product considered to be very powerful for developers. Basically it is also for content publishing, but has many other features such as e-mail marketing and site analytics. The analytics are maybe one of the most interesting features, thanks to the depth of the information the user gets, such as customer’s actions. The CMS lets you build and manage a customer database (which is feature most of the other CMS lack) and allows you to sell your products online. Unlike many other CMS, Business Catalyst can easily be integrated with PayPal, Google Checkout and other pre-integrated payment gateways.

The main difference between Adobe’s CMS and other ones is that Business Catalyst focuses much more on online businesses than on blogs. If you want to have a blog, then Business Catalyst is not the way to go. However, if you have products you want to sell, you can skip a lot of coding and stress by going with this option, because it is probably the best one out there. You can create a custom HTML/CSS layout, upload it and then integrate the available modules into it  - it can’t be easier. Adobe offers five types of monthly licenses for Business Catalyst, ranged between $9 and $79.

3. Cushy CMS

For Cushy CMS you don’t have to pay anything, because it comes free of charge. You can, however, go pro for $28 per month, but you have pretty much what you need if you are a beginner in the free version. Cushy is very similar to WordPress in this matter. If you go for the free version you have only very basic features available and will not be able to upload your own logo, change colors, use your domain name, customize the themes and others.

The main advantage of Cushy is that is simple and you do not require PHP, ASP.net or any other programming language to use it. Cushy produces as well standards compliant, search engine friendly content. Another advantage is that the server space is unlimited even with the free version.

4. Contao

Formerly known as TYPOlight, Contao changed its name in June 2010 and is an accessible open source CMS that enhances functionality. There is no CMS in the world that can compare itself with WordPress in terms of plugins and extensions, but Contao does its best efforts with a large database of useful plugins available for everybody. There are hundreds of additional modules which are easy to install and customize and there are also lots of templates available.

The downside of Contao are exactly the custom templates which have to be bought and for which you might need to know some CSS, because they definitely need to be customized to fit your needs. The templates are not great and if you look to create a visual impact but don’t have design and coding knowledge, Contao might not be the best choice.

5. Radiant CMS

Radiant CMS is based on Ruby on Rails and has a very active community for support and updates. Radiant focuses on making everything user-friendly for everybody and offers flexible templates which can be customized right after installation. Radiant features a very good and flexible site structure, custom text filters and page caching. It is not full of plugins and modules, but it gets the job done. Moreover, the CMS is free of charge.

6. SilverStripe

SilverStripe is another open-source application written with the use of PHP. It has many configurable options and targets websites with a lot of content, because it is very easy to manage it. Built on the Saphire framework, SilverStripe offers very good SEO support and allows users to customize the administration area too, which is quite rare nowadays.

The downside of SilverStripe are the default layouts, which are pure basic templates, but as long as you know some design, customizing them should not be a problem. You might also find some custom templates on the internet and spare some time designing yourself.

7. Textpattern CMS

Textpattern is a relatively popular Content Management System due to its simplicity. It provides great tools and allows users to create content very easy, quick and according to web standards-compliant pages. There is not a WYSIWYG editor included, because the CMS uses textile markup for content generation, which means text is automatically generated into HTML (this option is available in WordPress as well, so you should be used to it). The administration panel is very easy to use and follow.

Textpattern comes free of charge as well and allows many things such as layout editing, file and image upload, plugin installation, SEO tools, subscribing features and a big support team which continuously improves the platform.

8. Alfresco

Alfresco is very easy to install and lets you convert files into documents. Alfresco might be a bit more difficult to get used to, but if you put some time into it, in the end it will pay off. Alfresco is not that much for beginner bloggers, but targets developers much more. Don’t get me wrong, this CMS is very flexible and usable and the administration panel is organized, maintained and easy to navigate through, it just takes a bit more time to get used to it. Alfresco is an open-source product as well.

Tips on choosing the perfect CMS for you

After reviewing these CMS, you probably have a difficult choice in choosing one of them, therefore I thought of sharing some tips with you very fast. First time you have to think what your needs are. If you are business oriented and want to sell something, Adobe Business Catalyst is probably the only choice, although it might be a bit pricey. The rest of the CMSs reviewed here are for bloggers, although Expression Engine might be a bit too expensive, so try to avoid it if you only do this for passion and don’t plan on getting serious with it.

You also have to think how intuitive and easy to use the system is and how good the GUI interface looks. If the administration panel is difficult to use, then why should you choose that one? In the end, the administration panel is the place where you will spend 95% of your time.

Think also if the CMS is flexible enough and allows you to use plugins or modules. And make a short research before choosing one of them and see if the available plugins and modules are enough for you. If the CMS is not extensible, I personally don’t consider it worthy to be chosen.

In case you are a developer, this tip might not be for you, but if you are a blogger only, or maybe a front-end designer, would you feel comfortable to have to edit ASP.net or PHP pages/modules? If not, then choose a CMS that doesn’t force you to do this. If it is too complex it might not be for you.

Other important thing you should consider is the security. I am aware of the fact that the largest CMS in the World, WordPress, has security issues all the time, but at least they try to work on them. There is no perfect CMS if we take a look at their security, but hey, this is the internet today, there is not that much you can do. However, it is a good to make a bit of research and see which CMS is the most secure.

Find out if the system is optimized for speed and performance, like Expression Engine is, and then look into the documentation and support. At some point in time you might need some help and it is important to have a place where you know you can find answers.

With this last tip I put an end to this article. I hope all the small, but very good and interesting CMS I’ve reviewed today look interesting to you and I hope this article helps you a bit in the process of choosing your next Content Management System.

BONUS

Earlier today Salman talked about Pligg, a Social Networking CMS for people who want to create a website like Digg and Reddit. Also included are 20 examples of how Pligg is used. Be sure to check it!

WordPress.org is actually a source it provides to those users who don’t want to use WordPress.com to host their blog and want to host it themselves. But the story just doesn’t end there with the blog installation. It comes with a lot of new features and options which has made it very flexible since the day it came into being. I have been in the blogging business for some time and I have realized the importance of the wealth of options WordPress brings upfront. Starting from its great content management system to its easy to use technology, WordPress is the most common product businesses use for their online work.

The reason I am praising WordPress this much is not just one reason alone, and hence I have tried to talk about the most important ones down below to help you realize what WordPress is really capable of.

Flexible Open Source

Everything that makes up WordPress is open source. The functionalities and features such as Comments, Posts, Installation Facility, Galleries, Trash boxes, Plugins and much more, are regularly added and updated by the developers on the WordPress database. This forces the developers to work as per industry’s recent requirements and trends. This is where WordPress being open source saves the day when we freely use technology to code behind the system and modify the system easily with the help of MySQL, PHP, CSS and much more. The most important benefit of WordPress being open source is that they are many developers out there and as soon as they pick up any bug in the system resulting in some threat, they close it down as quick as they can.

Great Content Management System

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This content management system tool helps you create and then update the web pages so easily, on your own, when required. You can easily add content to your site, pictures, events and even products whenever you want, in just simple steps. This option comes in handy when there are clients who don’t want the WordPress developers to maintain their site and ask for more money. And so the clients prefer WordPress for the reason that they themselves can add content to their website due to the easy functionality it provides them. And the best part is that the users learn to use WordPress in less than hours, because of the easy to use and similar to Microsoft Word functions for editing.

Search Engine Optimization Friendly

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There is no benefit to great content if you don’t get enough organic traffic for it. And by organic I am talking about the readers who are on your site to really read your articles, those that have searched for something they really are interested in. And to make it certain that they land on your site for that specific search, you have to optimize your site and make it search engine friendly. There are many blogging platforms out there, but talking about the Search Guru ‘Google’, it crawls WordPress a lot and hence the sites using the WordPress platform tend to rank well in the search results. The reason behind this is that WordPress platform is very Search Engine Friendly, because of the fact that it lets us easily update/add content to our site regularly. And search engines like to see fresh contents on sites and opt for the regularly updated sites/blogs. Apart from the easily able to add content feature, WordPress allows to easily come up with inbound links, track-backs, submit comments and ping our content, which helps in improving our page rank, and hence traffic towards the site. These features might be available on other platforms, but with the flexibility and easy to edit option on the WordPress platform, it really wins the race.

Media Support

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A website looks much better when it is customized to and uses some effects to look more appealing. This can be done by several flash codes, adding images, adding slide-shows, embedding videos and audio. And this is where WordPress prove to be very handy for it has great support for adding media files to it and jQuery slide-shows etc. Apart from all the media files, we can also insert Google Maps, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Scribd and other related things to give an attractive look to our content (site). WordPress proves to be very handy because of the flexibility it provides, to edit the appearance and make it easier for you to create sites that will appeal to your customers, and their clients in return.

Extended Plugins

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You want a header that changes color every 10 seconds? Great, there is a plugin for that. Want to promote your new content on social media with just a click? No problem, there is a plugin for that. Curious about how many readers are on your site right now? Oh well, lets see how many there are with the help of this plugin. You see, everything you want to do, or you think of, can easily be done in WordPress with just a simple plugin which is not that much of a headache to install. The core functionality of WordPress is already very impressive but the beauty the extended plugins give it, is simply out of the box. There are lots and lots of plugins out there, freely available on WordPress database, easily installable from inside the system with just a click, which will do whatever you want them too. These plugins start from SEO up-to design tweaks, and if there is something you want to do and can’t find a plugin for that, well don’t worry about it. The open source feature of WordPress gives you the room, so you can hire a developer and tell him what you want, and see him play with the PHP and bring you the development to make the functions more flexible.

Easy To Use

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It’s literally no more complicated than Microsoft Word, in terms of editing and adding new content. If you were trying to bring up a tweak and mistakenly broke something, it’s not a big headache because WordPress has a very good support forum with many moderators who will help you in minutes when you post your query. However, the main task of the platform is to maintain your website easily and it performs the task without complications.

WordPress being free, downloadable, and easy to install on your own server, with a simple and easily flexible user interface which truly requires no knowledge of programming, where you can make custom pages and widgets with just a click, and where half the coding is done by it itself, would absolutely be the first choice by all the developers around the internet. These important reasons are I think enough for you to opt for WordPress for your next website. I know there are many other CMS platforms having their own pro’s and con’s and I would love to hear your opinion as to why should we opt for them and not WordPress. Leave your opinion in the comments below. It’s always beneficial to get into discussion regarding these topics.

Here are examples of some big blogs who use WordPress as their blogging platform.

Big Blogs that Use WordPress

1. Cloud 365 Project

The Clouds 365 Project is a project based on pictures and videos of clouds.

2. WebDesignerWall

A wall of design ideas, web trends, and tutorials.

3. The Uprising Creative

The official site, blog, and portfolio of design and web development studio, The Uprising Creative.

4. AllThingsD

AllThingsD.com is a Web site devoted to news, analysis and opinion on technology, the Internet and media.

5.Bloginity

Bloginity.com focuses on entertainment news content and is updated between 50 and 75 times daily.

6.Boing Boing

Boing Boing is an online “neurozine” that covers everything from technology and science to steampunk and “weird.”

7. TED Blog

TED is a small nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design.

8. TechCrunch

TechCrunch, founded on June 11, 2005, is a weblog dedicated to obsessively profiling and reviewing new Internet products and companies.

9. Playstation Blog

A blog by SCEA for PlayStation Fans.

10. Mashable

With more than 5 million monthly pageviews, Mashable is the world’s largest blog focused exclusively on social networks.

11. I Love Typography

I Love Typography, devoted to fonts, typefaces and all things typographical

12. H-Mag

h MAG is a high-end luxury magazine for the Hoboken market.

14. Gizmodo Live

Gizmodo is a blog with the sole purpose of writing about tech and gadgets as fast as possible.

15. Fuse Design

Fuse Design is an award-winning creative graphic design and web design agency based in the heart of Nottingham, UK.

16. Lifehacker

Tips, tricks, and downloads for getting things done.

In this article I will briefly point seven alternate uses of WordPress aside from using it as a blogging platform. There are only seven examples but that doesn’t mean you can’t use it for other purposes. So, I hope you will enjoy this article and share your thoughts!

1. Online Shop

Just couple your WordPress with a specialized theme for online shops and a simple e-commerce plugin and you’re all set. It’s that simple actually. All you need is a basic understanding of how websites work and in less than 10 minutes you can already set up your website (provided you already have a host).

From small to medium online shops this is actually better than hiring a developer to start it from scratch. With today’s economy, everyone should be thinking about getting the best for less. And that means using WordPress to set up an online shop.

Security is always an issue, especially for 3rd-party plugins. There are decent free plugins that offer some support, but if you’re big-time serious, whip that wallet out and purchase a good plugin with full support. That way, you can’t be wronged.

2. Gallery or Image Viewer

(Plugging: massive CSS gallery collection underway, be sure to check back!)

This is best for designers and photographers who wish to have their own website instead of using ready made portfolio websites. This might be tricky for many, since we all know that designers and other creatives really want to add their personal touch to everything they do, such as the website design. Designing a theme is quite the task, but it pays off.

Most CSS galleries use WordPress too.

Before WordPress was around yet (and other popular CMS’), everyone who wanted to have a website of their own needed to have at least an intermediate understanding of web development and designing, or know someone who did. Now there are CMS’ like WordPress that eliminate the mandatory coding. That is a very good news for people. To add to that, making WordPress a gallery or an image viewer has become a common thing today because of the countless free and premium plugins and themes developed for this purpose.

3. Static Website and Brochure Site

For people who are in a hurry to get something online as soon as possible without learning how to code and design, WordPress is the man.

For promotion of a business, institution, idea, and anything that tells people what you are and what you do. Several restaurants have websites that are powered by WordPress, same goes for institutions and other propaganda movements. Websites like these doesn’t really need interaction from users, information is enough.

Expansion is also easy, from static to dynamic. No sweat, sonny.

4. Membership Site

There are websites that offer tutorials and several useful articles, like 1stwebdesigner. Then there are websites with a different and more focused side, membership sites. For a price their subscribers can get premium benefits; usually focused and more in-depth than the usual tutorials, resources, and extreme information that you can only learn from an expert.

People who create a membership site, whether they are individuals or a group of people, are already established in their field and have a massive following. If you are thinking of creating one, there are free and premium plugins ready for this, no more coding necessary. It’s really that easy, in fact, almost any feature that you can think of has already been made. All you need to do is know where to look.

Providing premium e-books, tutorials, web seminars, and other premium services you can think of.

Then there’s another side to this. Creating a membership website for close circles of friends or family. Clubs, organizations, friends and families can use Facebook’s Groups, but the features are quite limited. Using WordPress to help connect close groups of people is also a great idea, especially when the group has a large membership.

5. Collaboration Tool

Well, there are actually 70+ collaboration tools running out there today, but what I mean with WordPress as a collaboration tool is using it as a discussion board open for the public. An open, and engaged, community of like-minded individuals.

During my last year in the university, my team and I used WordPress to openly discuss ideas with our professor in IT. Other teams are free to criticize and read just about anything we posted there.

Here is one great article about a mathematician’s WordPress blog (can be done with other platforms too, but I’m citing this just to give you an idea). If you have time, you can read the second and third paragraphs. Already late for work? The gist is, Timothy Gowers (the mathematician in question) thought of posting his ideas and problems on his blog. Days later, people got involved.

6. Job Board and Forum

Well, it’s really far from its real purpose but you can actually use WordPress to create a forum and a job board. There are several plugins that you can use, and I’m not listing them here to force you to pay WordPress.org a visit and do the searching there. Or just use Google.

So, why WordPress again for this? Because it’s easy to use andvery flexible. Anyone can create a forum or a job board in an instant.

7. Link Repository and News Aggregator

I particularly like websites that link to other websites. Heh, that’s not even a clear description. What I mean is websites that categorize links so that readers of a certain niche are updated. It may work like a feed reader, but personally I find this one better. Take for example Smashing Network, that’s what I mean. A website that is focused on doing that. I don’t know about you, but I really like websites like that.

Although it may not be a WordPress site, one website I visit daily is eScienceNews. The website claims that it’s updates are fully automatic. Who updates it and how? Artificial Intelligence. Well, now you get the idea of what I mean. Maybe there are other definition of what link repository is, feel free to comment in.

So, What Else?

As you can see, almost anything that you can think of is possible with WordPress. All you need to have is a little background of how websites work and what features you’d like it to have and good research skills to find specific plugins. A web developer friend of mine told me “why start from scratch when there are good CMS’ available to expedite the process?” when I asked him “how long will it take for me to develop a website similar to icanhascheezburger.com?”

You may now start accusing me of leaving out other uses for WordPress. I intentionally left them out, I’ve thought of about 20 and read as many as 40. I don’t want this to be an over-saturated article so you can just post your suggestions and thoughts below. C’mon!

Reasons You Might Build Your Own CMS

First off, the main reason is that you have 100% control. Yes, it can be a lot of work, but if you plan to have multiple sites then it is awesome to have your own CMS that you can easily fully customize to whatever you want. Secondly, I did this to further sharpen my PHP, JS, AJAX, Jquery, CSS, and HTML skills. The company that I work for does not, and will not, ever use open source CMS or even a retail CMS. There are several ups and downs to using a common CMS. The ups are that you can easily find people to help you work on things with it and one of the main downsides is if there is any sort of flaw or security issue then everyone will know about it quickly and you can be vulnerable to attacks until it is fixed.

Adding Content To Your CMS

To kick this off I would like to talk about the front end structure of your site first. If you want to be able to easily add content on the fly to your site then the layout has to allow for it. Unless you create a CMS that builds the entire page’s HTML files. The example that I plan to show you does not show building entire HTML pages, but it can easily be altered to do so. The basic setup of the content manager that I am showing you guys is going to require a layout that is flexible but simple and a little bit of work from the .htaccess.

The Back End For Adding Content

The actual back end itself is very basic but depending on your site and features it can very well be more complex if you like. You simply start with a form in your CMS to add/edit/delete content pages. This form will need at the very least a place for a url and a place to add content. Technically you do not need the url you could simply do a ?id=84 with the 84 just being an auto increment from the database. Obviously this is a pretty ugly way to do it so we will assign URLs to each. Along with a URL and content I always have at least a page title, meta keywords, and meta description but regardless of what you have it is all basically the same.

What You Need On The Front End

If you have made it this far along in the tutorials I assume you probably do not need any help with how to make this form so I will skip those details. However, I will just mention that each of the new content pages that you add with this form will need to be stored in a database. I do it with an auto increment id field for the PRIMARY key and also add an INDEX on the url field because we will be using that field to look up pages. From there you can handle the front end in a few different ways. You can go back to my flat file caching and cache out each content page as an array using the url as the key for each element so that it is easy to reference. I have done things like this in the past but don’t usually anymore as the benefits are really more opinion/preference than performance in many situations. Another option, and the one I most commonly use, would be to simply take the url and look up the page in the database then display the content. When done this way I like to have a header.php, header.init.php, and of course my index.php and footer.php. The header.init will be where I have the code to parse out the URL and try to find the content page in the database. The header is mainly just some html that contains the header area of my website and the index is the middle content area of my site that will display content per the given URL. You will also have a .htaccess file to handle redirects.

.htaccess

<br />
RewriteEngine On</p>
<p>RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^bbillman.com$ [NC]<br />
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.bbillman.com/$1 [R=301,L]<br />
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^([www\.]?)bbillman.com$ [NC]<br />
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.bbillman.com/$1 [R=301,L]</p>
<p>RewriteRule ^tmp(.*)$ /admin/tmp_image.php [NC,L]<br />
RewriteRule ^(.*)(\.(jpg|jpeg|gif|png|css|ico|xml|txt))$	-	[NC,L]<br />
RewriteRule ^$	-	[NC,L]</p>
<p>#RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/$1 !-f<br />
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f<br />
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(.*)/$<br />
RewriteRule ^(.*)$	/$1/	[NC,L,R=301]</p>
<p>RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/$1 !-f<br />
RewriteRule ^(.*)$	index.php?uri=$1	[QSA]<br />

The first line is obvious, it turns the engine on, the next few will make sure www is always at the front of the url, the third block will basically tell it to ignore the rest of the htaccess if it is an image being accessed, the fourth is saying to first look for the specified file, and the end is like a catch-all where it will send anything to index.php with a query string of uri=$1 ($1 will be whatever is after the / in the url).

header.init.php

<br />
 $v)<br />
			{<br />
				if(is_array($v))<br />
					return is_empty($v);<br />
				elseif(isset($v) || $v!='')<br />
					return false;<br />
			}<br />
		}<br />
		else<br />
		{<br />
			if(isset($array) || $array!='')<br />
				return false;<br />
			else<br />
				return true;<br />
		}<br />
		return true;<br />
	}</p>
<p>	if(is_array($parts) &amp;amp;&amp;amp; !is_empty($parts)){<br />
		$rparts = array_reverse($parts);<br />
		foreach($rparts as $v){<br />
			$p_q = $db-&amp;gt;query(&amp;quot;SELECT url,content,meta_title,meta_keywords,meta_description,parent_id FROM content WHERE seo_url='$v' AND live='1' LIMIT 1&amp;quot;);<br />
			if($db-&amp;gt;num_rows($p_q)){<br />
				$_PAGE = $db-&amp;gt;fetch_assoc($p_q);<br />
				if(is_array($_PAGE)){<br />
					foreach($_PAGE as $k =&amp;gt; $sv)<br />
						$_PAGE[$k] = stripslashes($sv);<br />
				}<br />
				break;<br />
			}<br />
		}<br />
	}else{<br />
		$p_q = $db-&amp;gt;query(&amp;quot;SELECT url,content,meta_title,meta_keywords,meta_description FROM content WHERE seo_url='' AND live='1' LIMIT 1&amp;quot;);<br />
		$_PAGE = $db-&amp;gt;fetch_assoc($p_q);<br />
		if(is_array($_PAGE)){<br />
			foreach($_PAGE as $k =&amp;gt; $sv)<br />
				$_PAGE[$k] = stripslashes($sv);<br />
		}<br />
	}</p>
<p>	if(!is_array($_PAGE)){<br />
		//404<br />
	}<br />
?&amp;gt;<br />

The code is pretty simple. It just takes the uri and breaks it up into an array and starting from the back it searches the database for a matching url. If the url exists then it will put all of the contents for that page into an array $_PAGE and if not then it will try to grab the home page (where url=”) and if there is no page then you can have it do a 404. In the header of course you would set the meta data and have whatever other design stuff you need for your site in there.

index.php

<br />
&amp;lt;?php<br />
include'includes/header.php';<br />
echo $_PAGE['content'];<br />
include'includes/footer.php';<br />
?&amp;gt;<br />

Using this method your index.php could be as simple as this. It will include the header and footer and just output the content of the requested URL in the middle.

Conclusion To Creating Your Own CMS Part 3

In conclusion, this is an easy and effective way to make adding content quick and easy. This can also be done for blogs actually and done almost exactly the same way. One thing is you would have to add a rule in your htaccess to send URLs with /blog/ to a separate blog.php or add some more code to your index.php, but I prefer to have them separate for readability and such. Likewise this can be used for events or pretty much any other content that you would like to add to your site. Adding new content is obviously important as it will help you to get some SEO built up because the internet is all about information.

Other parts of the tutorial:

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3

<?php
        //this first part checks to see if you are already logged in and if you are it redirects you
        if(isset($_SESSION['started']))
	{
		header('Location: /admin/');
		exit;
	}

        //this next is actually something that i just thought of because it is annoying to
        //have to add an entry via phpmyadmin with a md5  password (and even worse
        //when you get into much more secure passwords)
        if(isset($_SESSION['failed']))
		unset($_SESSION['failed']);
	if(isset($_SESSION['no_su']))
		unset($_SESSION['no_su']);
        //above clears out the no_su and failed session variables to clear just in case

	$su_check = $db->query("SELECT id FROM logins WHERE super_user='1' LIMIT 1");
	if(!$db->num_rows($su_check))
		$_SESSION['no_su']=true;
        if($_POST && !$_SESSION['no_su'])
	{
		//here is the login code that we used before
	}
	elseif($_POST && $_SESSION['no_su']==true)
	{
		//no_su is only set if there are no entries in the logins table
		//so this will put one in there
		$username = stripslashes($_POST['username']);
		$password = md5($_POST['password']);

		$db->query("INSERT INTO logins (username,password,date_added,super_user) VALUES('$username','$password','".time()."','1')");
		unset($_SESSION['no_su']);
	}
?>

You can see in the above query that I set the field super_user=’1′ on my insert. I did this because this should be the main/root/admin account or whatever you would like to call it. And later when we make permissions the super_user will be giving access regardless.

I do also add a little note when the login page loads so that you know you are not trying to login but you are actually setting up the main/first login account. This is accomplished by adding a block of php in the html that creates the login box like below.

<?php
	if(isset($_SESSION['failed']) && $_SESSION['failed']=='yes')
		echo '<div id="fail" class="info_div"><span class="ico_cancel">Incorrect username or password!</span></div>';
	elseif(isset($_SESSION['no_su']) && $_SESSION['no_su']==true)
		echo '<div id="fail" class="info_div"><span class="ico_cancel">SETUP SUPER USER ACCOUNT!</span></div>';
?>

As you can see above, there is also a check for a failed attempt that will output an error message if need be.

Adding And Editing Access Levels

Access levels are something that can vary greatly depending on the site and it’s requirements. A site could be managed by one person and need only one level, that being total access. Some sites will hire freelance blog writers, and these writers do not need access to anything more than the most basic levels which allow them to write and save their posts. I mean seriously, there are some real nut cases out there, just because you think you know someone doesn’t mean you should let them have access to your site. The access level control that we are going to create is pretty powerful, and very flexible, but will not be as in depth as something bigger sites would have.

The logic behind the access levels that we are going to use is going to be as simple as giving certain people access to certain php files. We can also have a setting to give them access to live content or not. First, to make it easy to keep track of the files that we want to restrict access to we are going to create an array of the “admin pages”. The beauty part of this array is it can be used for more than just access levels. We will use this array to actually build the site navigation and to restrict access. Obviously there are other ways to do this, but if we have it all in an array then when we want to add a new page to our admin we will not have to change any coding to add it to the access levels and everything else.

<?php
	$_AP = array(
		array(title=>'Dashboard',
			url=>'/admin/content/'
			),
		array(title=>'Content',
			url=>'/admin/content/content.php',
			dd=>array(
				array(title=>'Add Content',
					url=>'/admin/content/content.php?action=add'
					)
				)
			),
		array(title=>'Events',
			url=>'/admin/content/events.php',
			dd=>array(
				array(title=>'Add Event',
					url=>'/admin/content/events.php?action=add'
					)
				)
			),
		array(title=>'Venues',
			url=>'/admin/content/venues.php',
			dd=>array(
				array(title=>'Add Venue',
					url=>'/admin/content/venues.php?action=add'
					)
				)
			)
		);
?>

You can see from the array I am building my navigation. So this way, when I want to add a new page to my admin I simply start by adding a new entry to the array. When I do this it will automatically be on the page. If I have key ‘dd’ with an array nested inside of there, it becomes a drop down. There are many different ways that you could possibly structure the array, and many different things that you can add to it. Below is the code that we use to go through the array and create that navigation.

<?php
        	function create_nav($ap,$close=false)
	{
		define('LB',chr(10));
		$output;
		if(is_array($ap))
		{
			$count = count($ap);
			$i=1;
			foreach($ap as $k => $v)
			{
				$output .= '<li><a href="'.$v['url'].'">'.$v['title'].'</a>'.LB;
				if($v['dd'])
				{
					$output .= '<ul>'.LB;
					$output .= create_nav($v['dd'],true);
				}

				if($close==true && $i==$count)
					$output .= '</ul>'.LB;
				$output .= '</li>';
				$i++;
			}
		}
		return $output;
	}

        //The function is simply called like this with $_AP obviously being the array of pages
        echo create_nav($_AP);
?>

You can see that this is pretty simple, it just runs through the loop and creates an unordered list of all of the items.

Now let’s build a simple form to add and edit users and access levels

I am going to assume that you know how to build form elements (and if you don’t there are some great simple tutorials right here on 1WD). So I am going to go through the logic behind it. You will of course want a simple for to add/edit users and a form to add/edit different access levels. First, lets talk about the access levels. For the access levels we can make it as simple as a form to name the access level and an array of checkboxes, one for each page. Then say I want to create an access level “admin” I would just type “admin” into the name textbox and check all of the checkboxes which will grant them access to every tab, as you can see below.

Then with the add/edit administrators you will simply want to hit up the database for all of the available access levels and put them in a drop down to choose from. And lastly I will show you how to put these to use.

When someone logs into the admin we set several session variables, and the users access level will be one of them. So we can just write a function that we put in the header, to make sure that it is on every page, that will check whether that person has access to the page they are trying to access. The function could look something like this.

<?php
		function check_access(){
			GLOBAL $db;
			$al = $_SESSION['access_level'];
			$a_q = $db->query("SELECT pages FROM access_levels WHERE id='$al' LIMIT 1");
			$a = $db->fetch_assoc($a_q);//pages is just a serialized array in the database
			$allowed_pages = unserialize($a['pages']);
			$parts = explode('/',$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];
			$count = count($parts);
			if(!in_array($parts[$count-1],$allowed_pages)){ //if the page they want isn't in the array of pages they can have
				header('Location: /admin/');//send them home
				exit;
			}
		}
?>

And here we have a very simple version of admins and access levels that is based off of php scripts access. We can take this further in many different ways, and one would be to also allow setting “action” access per page. Like allowing users to add/edit, but not delete. And it would be very simple to implement in the function that we just coded by checking the query string for actions.

Other parts of the tutorial:

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3

So here, I will share other recommended CMS that would also allow you to use many options and features. But alongside before picking up a right CMS remember to carefully check out for pro’s and con’s of particular system which will be used for your blogging or business.

1. Tumblr

Pros: Clean, fast and easy-to-use. You can choose from the various prebuilt page themes, according to your taste. This “miniblog” features mobile posting and viewing, support for videos and several types of feeds.

Cons: No comment feature.

2. Expression Engine

Pros: intuitive back-end interface for easy content editing
Cons: templating system is a bit more development intensive than some others

3. FlatPress

Pros: Clear and simple. It does not require a DataBase Management System to work. You wont be needing MySQL because it stores all of its content on text files.

Cons: Few options, such as meta tags, etc. Post URL not (directly) configurable.

4. GetSimple CMS

Pros: Truly the simplest way to manage a small-business website. XML Based, which means it doesn’t use mySQL to store information.

Cons: Missing other features like multilevel page hierarchy, plugin capability, main menu nesting for sub-pages, administration panel theme changes & code clean up. (but then again, it’s a simple CMS)

5. LifeType

Pros: Single database with multiple user capability and mobile features. User friendly interface, built-in anti-spam filter, support for trackbacks, and integrated media management.

Cons: Interface at first seems to be confusing, but since it uses smarty templates it was fairly easy to insert hints that help users get around and familiarize themselves.

6. Habari

Pros: Cutting edge technology, PHP5.2 required. It supports  both MySQL and SQLite (PostgreSQL support is planned). Apache 2.0 license, following the meritocracy principles, and has support for Apache, Lighttp and Nginx serve as well. Core developers are well respected and blog experienced.

Cons: Very young community and software, only few themes and plugins available. Apache2.0 license: sometimes discussion, decision can take ages.

7. Drupal

Pros: It’s an open source (free) with very active community of contributors. It has lots of add ons, offers downlaodable and free themes available for customization.  And not to mention, it works on many Platforms (LAMP, MAMP,WAMP)

8. Frog CMS

Pros: If you want something that is light-weight, fast and simple to work with Frog is the rigth choice. It is a well documented CMS and because it’s based on the popular PHP language it will be easy for most people to implement.

Cons: Because it is very basic and simple, it may only be good for photography or small type of business.

9. Serendipity

A PHP-powered weblog application which gives the user an easy way to maintain an online diary, weblog or even a complete homepage. While the default package is designed for the casual blogger, Serendipity offers a flexible, expandable and easy-to-use framework with the power for professional applications.

10.  Contao

Pros:

Formerly named as Typo, now known as Contao – a very powerful, clean and well organized. One can make very elaborate and detailed page structures, content layouts and modules that can be positioned within the system. It has an extension manager that would allow you to browse and install extensions without leaving the back end.

Cons:

Because it is overwhelmingly powerful, the layout can get pretty confusing and heavy that would cause occasional hang ups. You have to maintain the links of the theme designer or pay extra to remove them. Themes doesn’t come for free.

11. Text Pattern

This is the type of CMS that focuses mainly on content. Creating a line between content and design, users delight less advanced clients with it’s simple back-ends. Read more reviews..

12. Melody

Derived from the blogging tool Movable type, this new type of CMS is for those who find value in belonging to, supporting and contributing to a community of helpful, passionate and devoted users, but it is also for people who want a secure, proven and high quality publishing environment for their personal web site or their business.  Read more review…

13. Joomla

This is the right CMS for people who knows less about programming. The latest product strengthen its positions by solving the problems of friendly links and languages version. Read more reviews…

14. Movable Type

This CMS lets you experience superior performance, quality spam protection & sturdy architecture that allows you to customize, manage, categorize your blog and archive your content. It has Easy-To-Use Tools that lets you control the conversation. Read more reviews…

15. B2evolution

b2evolution is the ideal CMS software for various types of advanced bloggers and professionals in a blog-centric organization. Used by selected, but enthusiastic group of bloggers, the community is active and vital. Read more reviews…

16. Radiant

With this type of CMS, managing your blog is simple and straightforward. You can create pages, snippets, and layouts to form the basis of your website. The core is kept simple but still allows others to add on with extensions. Read more reviews…

17. Symphony CMS

Symphony is an open source CMS that is not only flexible, but is also an open architecture with the power of XSLT to give users complete control over every aspect of their project, from its data structures to its templating layer and everything in between. Not to mention, it has a vibrant, responsive community and 24/7 commercial support. Which makes it as viable for the demanding corporate client as it is for the hobbyist. Read more reviews…

18. Cushy CMS

It’s a good solution for designers and users alike who are look for a blog easy to use. There requires almost no instruction for the client to use if they know how to use a word processor. It is something that you will probably continue to use on a case-by-case basis. Ultimately, it will be up to my clients and I as to what CMS solution will be best for them. Read more reviews…

19. Silverstripe

This CMS is used for creating and maintaining websites. It provides a web-based administration panel that enables users to make modifications to parts of the website. This panel includes a WYSIWYG website editor. Read more reviews…

20. Concrete 5

If you want a CMS that’s super easy and functional, then this is what you need.  It’s as easy to use as WordPress, with the added bonus of being able to customize the look. Read more reviews..

21. Nucleus CMS

Nucleus CMS is an open-source blog software that is used to manage Web content that updates frequently. It’s written in PHP, and it uses a MySQL backend. Nucleus has strong core features and many plugins available for extra features. Read more reviews…

22. Posterous

Easy – the word to best describe this online micro-blogging platform and web publishing service, with an easy sign-up process and social networking for users. It also supports most of the file formats and features mobile blogging . Now blogging is breezy like sending out an email.  Read more reviews…

23. LiveJournal

This CMS lets you choose from numerous templates and lets you add your own custom CSS style sheet if you want. It also supports some changes to the HTML code in the templates if you want to customize your blog.  You can also embed your journal into your own website or create a blog from scratch. This blog service accepts posts from email enabled cell phones and from instant messaging services. You can also upload video and images. Read more reviews…

24. Blogger

Pros:

- Super Easy to use – just like sending email

- Mobile blogging, you can write articles though e-mail or your mobile.

- Upload your videos on Blogger.

- More intuitive interface (dummy proof)

- free to set up

- Easily customizable without hand coding- you can change background colors and position easily without programming knowledge

- You can earn money with the “free” blog too. (Unlike wordpress)

- Links with your Gmail account, so you don’t have to create a new account.

- No advertisements (Until you want them to be there)

- You can buy a domain and host it on blogger itself.

Cons:

- Tags indexing in search engine- the categories would not be followed by the search engines.

- The list of posts under the page is like older and newer, instead of “paging” in WordPress 1,2,3,4,5,6……100

- No related posts widget, hacks are available but no easy way.

- The navigation bar may not look so good. (Though you can remove it using CSS)

- Customization of the widgets a little complex, especially for the new user.

- No definitive way to host blogger local system.

25. Croogo

Another promising type of open source CMS with very outstanding features. It allows users to create their own type of content (default: blog, page, node), categorize contents, customize fields, manage files and attachments – to name a few. The community behind it is starting to contribute plugins and themes helping extend the core. Read more reviews…

Design of Your Own CMS

This may or may not be important to you. But when it comes down to it you will most likely be much more proud of your CMS with a nice design and design is where the usability starts. I could programming some amazing things but without a design I am limiting myself and wasting a lot of time. I have created a few CMS’s from scratch but I found out that when you give me a design for a CMS it not only comes out a lot neater but I can produce it much faster.

Here is the one that I chose as well as a few others to browse through.

I am creating this CMS as I type this so you guys are looking at it first hand. That is also the main reason I am not sure how many advanced parts we will have but I am willing to take requests while I work.

A Few Things To Have Before You Begin the Login

If you haven’t already setup the database then you can refer to one of my recent posts “Getting Started With MySQL DB and PHP with PHPMyAdmin”. Along with the database it is nice to have a database class file and a database connection file. These are two files that you will be using on each project you do so it is nice to have them on hand. The db.php can just go in the htdocs/ and the db.class.php should go in the htdocs/classes/ folder.

People do their file structure differently but for me I have an Ubuntu server with each site in the home folder like: /home/www.llafl.com/htdocs/
Within the htdocs/ we will want a few different folders as well.

• admin/
  • classes/
  • css/
  • images/
  • includes/
  • lib/
  • markitup/
• cache/
• classes/
• css/
• images/
• includes/
• lib/

Most of this layout is pretty self-explanatory. You would have your index and other content files in the htdocs/ and in the htdocs/admin/ would be all of you admin content. Then the rest of the folders are all labeled for exactly what should be going in them. The cache/ folder can be used for several different items depending on the type of website that we are building.

Obviously this is not required nor any sort of standard this is just how I like to layout my sites file system to try to keep things neat.
Here the folder “markitup” contains a jquery markup editor which I actually haven’t used until now. I usually use ckeditor for a full featured easy to use editor.

Secure Login Code

With a secure login we will want to use sessions. You can get into more advanced parts with heavier use in cookies also but for now I am just going to show you a very basic secure login with a timeout on it. First though we need to make sure that when people try to go anywhere on our site that they will get sent to the login if they are not already logged in. Se we should put this in the header.php because that is included on every page in the admin, and we can do it like this.

<!--?php         if(!$_SESSION['llafl_admin'])         { 		$_SESSION['REQUEST_URI'] = $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']; //store the page they were trying to access 		header('Location: /admin/login.php'); 		exit; 	} ?-->

You can see here I am checking for a session variable which I have named ‘llafl_admin’. It is best to have a distinct session because if not then you run the chance of some other site having the same session variable. Like if we just made the variable ‘admin’, it is so generic it could be anywhere. So since we have a check like this that means that when someone is logged in then they should have a session variable ‘llafl_admin’, which we will do like this.

<!--?php <br ?-->	if($_SESSION['failed']=='yes')
		echo '</pre>
<div id="fail" class="info_div"><span class="ico_cancel">Incorrect username or password!</span></div>
<pre>
'; // display failed login if need be
?></pre>
<form id="loginform" action="/admin/login.php/" method="post" name="loginform"><label><strong>Username</strong></label><input id="user_login" class="input" type="text" name="username" size="28" />

 <label><strong>Password</strong></label><input id="user_pass" class="input" type="password" name="password" size="28" />

 <strong>Remember Me</strong><input id="remember" class="input noborder" type="checkbox" name="remember" />

 <input id="save" class="submit" type="submit" value="Log In" /></form>
<pre>

That is a a basic login form and below is the code to handle when it is submitted.

<!--?php 	if($_POST) 	{ 		if(!$_POST['username'] || !$_POST['password']) 			$_SESSION['failed']='yes'; 		else 		{ 			$username = stripslashes($_POST['username']); 			$password = md5($_POST['password']); 			$u_q = $db--->query("SELECT * FROM users WHERE username='$username' AND password='$password' LIMIT 1");
			$u = $db->fetch_assoc($u_q);
			if($u['id'])
			{
				$_SESSION['llafl_admin'] = $u['access_level'];
				$_SESSION['started'] = time();
				foreach($u as $key => $value)
					$_SESSION[$key] = stripslashes($value);
				$last_login = date('c',time());
				$db->query("UPDATE users SET last_login='$last_login' WHERE id='".$_SESSION['id']."' LIMIT 1");  // on successful login update users last login
				header('Location: '.$_SESSION['REQUEST_URI']); //if they successfully log in then send them to the url they requested which is something I have set in the header
				exit;
			}
			else
				$_SESSION['failed']='yes'; // if they failed to login this will set a session var that will trigger an error message
		}
	}
?>

You can see here this script checks to make sure that both inputs were indeed submitted and if they were then it goes on to check to see if they are in fact part of a legit login. Then if it is successful then the appropriate session variable are set. (You notice we do a stripslashes to sanitize the username and md5 will sanitize the password and make sure that it is not stored human readable in case the database were to be compromised.) And if not then a session variable for ‘failed’ will be set and when the login form reloads it will trigger an error message. There are many more security levels that you can add onto this but this is a very basic and secure login that will work for our purposes.

If you are confused by any of the database aspects then refer back to this post.

Other parts of the tutorial:

• Part 2
• Part 3