CMS Jam Content Management Systems: News and Resources

I’ve been keeping an eye on the Majestic CMS for a while, and now that it has moved to a free, open source model, and changed its name, it seems like a great time to blog about it.
Injader seems to be a nice cross between simple and feature-rich. Its goal is to be powerful, [...]

It’s not often you see those words together…free, open source, and ColdFusion. ColdFusion is a web programming scripting language similar to PHP, but it not as widely used because it isn’t free (although it is generally easier to learn). Hosting usually costs more as well. And on top of all of that, applications that run on ColdFusion usually aren’t free either. However, ColdFusion developers love it and are passionate about it, so this post is for them.

ColdBricks is a free, open source ColdFusion-based CMS. That alone is enough to make any ColdFusion developer want to run out and download it. I’ll be honest. I haven’t used it yet, so I can’t comment on how well it works. But it’s free, so…

If you want to do more than dip your toes into the CMS water, and would like to do a little extra customization of your CMS, you might want to consider purchasing CMS Builder. This tool makes the process of creating your new site fairly easy (although I’m not sure I would believe the less-than-5-minute claims they make). If you already have a design in mind (or an existing web site), you simply use their generator to create code for you to manage each section of your site (news, about us, contact us, etc.), adding, editing, and deleting fields to store the data as needed. Then, you copy/paste that generated code into your site’s design template. You can further customize that code by tweaking the…

A few days ago, I mentioned two “ultra-light” CMS editors that allow you to edit pre-defined portions of your existing web pages. Since then, I’ve been told about another one that has been around for a while, but is pretty sweet.

SnippetMaster is described as “a free content editing tool for website owners or designers who want a very easy, quick, and visual way to edit pre-defined areas on any web page, through any browser, without messing up the rest of the web page.” Like the other two, you essentially define portions of a web page, using special tags, that can be edited via the CMS admin area. Like the other two, it’s super simple to do. Just do this to a page…

Page content goes…

Although I wouldn’t recommend using this type of “ultra-light” CMS for most people, I can see using it for a few. If you already have a small site that you occasionally update by changing the files, and then ftp’ing the changes up to your server, you may have been wishing for a quick way to edit just the text without dealing with FTP. There are a few CMS’s that are designed to that - and only that - so you may want to check them out.

Lil’ CMS

The first that I’ll mention is Lil’ CMS. As you’ll see from the one-page site, there’s not much to this CMS. All you’re really getting is a simple little text file editor, and instructions on how to create includes…

I promised this site was always going to be geared towards newbies, individual webmasters, and mom and pop businesses, and anyone who needs a website that is easy to manage. To that end, my aim is to focus on any CMS that lends itself to being easy to use. My assumption is that most people who want a web site aren’t programmers, aren’t techy geeks, and don’t really want to hire one. Instead, they just want to be able to putz around and get a decent site up by themselves. I applaud that DIY spirit, and hope that CMS Jam can help foster it.

Nevertheless, there are times when the easiest CMS’s may not be the right one for you. Maybe you aren’t a programmer…

In case you’ve been living under a CMS rock, I want to make sure you know about the best demo site that ever lived - OpenSourceCMS. This site has a fairly extensive array of open source (free) CMS packages already installed, and you can play with (test) every one of them. You can [...]