Alternative Content Management
There are many more options available, beyond WordPress, Drupal & Joomla
Preamble
Let’s see, WordPress, Drupal, Joomla… we all know them. Great userbase, huge communities, millions of websites already using them. When the time comes and a new client requests a website, these guys are your first choice. Personally I am a WordPress lover. It helped me a lot to grow my business during hard times and I believe that I owe a lot to the community behind it.
But are -all these amazing “can do anything” applications- perfect for your next project? At the end, it is all about priorities. For a portfolio website, you need great Media Library Management, for a magazine good categorization and backend management. If your site has many authors, with low computer knowledge, you need easy administration interface, etc.
In my nine years experience, only the 10%-15% of my clients, wanted to manage their website’s content by themselves. This means that even if the WordPress administration is a state of the art, most of my clients will never experience it.
So, what are the specifications for most of the clients? Some pages, a simple news section and that’s it. Why dealing with a bigger than needed application?
The last months I did a deep search on the different options available (for free of course). Let me give you a quick tour!
Flat-File Systems (no database)
For me the main advantage of these systems (apart from their speed) is the ease of install, move and backup!
Pico
Pico is a stupidly simple & blazing fast, flat file, CMS. No databases, Smart Templating engine (Twig), Blogging ability, Simple Markdown for content creation and the most important of all? SPEED! Check this website you are in right now. My hosting server is a simple shared hosting plan in New York (not european datacenter), without any compression nor caching from my side. Dispite all these, it loads like a deamon! Check the pingdom report below: (the site is not even optimized and it is faster than 96% of all websites!) Check out Pico for yourself.
Leaflets
Leeflets is a simple, but powerful content management system. The platform was created to be ridiculously easy to setup and use. It is focused on single-page websites and it also features some nice looking templates for you to start with, saving a lot of hours. Check out Leaflets.
Droplets
Droplets is also a new platform dedicated to making blogging simple again. With no database, you can install Dropplets in seconds on any server, compose offline using markdown, then simply upload to publish. Mostly the same procedure as both the above systems. Check out Droplets.
These systems, do pretty much the same job. So pick the one you feel more comfortable with. I picked Pico, which you can experience here, by using this website.
Database driven systems
What about the times that you need something more sophisticated? Let’s say you have to deal with a photographer’s huge portfolio or with a more content-customized website.
In this cases there are some pretty interesting systems out there:
Anchor CMS
Anchor is a super-simple, lightweight blog system, made to let you just write. Its backend interface, is probably the most beautiful CMS administration interface, I have ever seen. Subtle colors and excellent use of whitespace.
If you need a blog or a simple “Page/Post” structure on your website, then AnchorCMS is definitely a choice you must concider seriously.
Check out AnchorCMS and its brilliantly designed website
Koken
Koken is something kinda unique. It is not a traditional CMS, but a system designed carefully for managing portfolios or large media libraries. It is a hot CMS among Designers, Photographers and Artists.
Others
There are also a couple of options more, which i couldn’t find time to download, install and test on my local environment. On the “NoDatabase side” Get Simple CMSlooks very powerful. It even has an admin backend! On the other side Bolt CMS lacks of backend design refinements, but at seems quite solid as a more tradional CMS solutions.
In Conclusion
As always evey tool’s power and usability is strongly tied with the goal you want to accomplish. Of course you will be more productive with the one you are feeling more comfortable with, but this means that you must test as many as possible!
Our business lies on continuous evolution, thus means we must not have tight bonds with old tools.
