LightNEasy is a terrific little content management system. It has extremely low server requirements, runs fast, has a simple-as-pie template system, and is quite search engine friendly.
One of my new favorite content management systems, LightNEasy works great for setting up and maintaining a multi-page website for fun or business. It excels at simplicity. It does not offer fancy add-ons. It was designed to run the back end of a content site, period. So don't expect calendars, chat, forums or other Web 2.0 features. What you get is a robust CMS that makes site design and operation easy.
Creating a custom site design with LightNEasy is among the easiset processes that I've seen. Most content management systems' templating structure is complex, many to the point where it can take many hours to import a design you've created into the CMS framework. Not so with LightNEasy. This system's template is easy to grasp. Half a dozen templates are included with the free download. One struck my eye right away as good for my purposes. I opened up the template folder and found two files - a PHP file and a CSS file. The CSS file was organized logically and included comments that helped me understand it within a couple of minutes. The PHP was even simpler - only 33 lines of html code, understandable at a glance.
The template I looked at handles page layout in the css file. The php/html file simply places the four main CMS content areas within that css structure. But you could just as easily skip css altogether and build a template solely in html. Inserting the content areas from the CMS is as easy as including a code like $#content#$ where you want it in the design. That particular code displays the main content from each page. Other codes, just as simple, display the header, footer, site title, main menu, secondary menu or static block of text. Anyone who can build an html or html/css page can use this template system. It's that easy.
The other part of the script's name, light, is also accurate. The script is released in two versions, both free. One version requires only PHP and uses text files for storage. The other version stores data in SQLite. SQLite is not a complex client-server database engine like MySQL. SQLite is a small extension to PHP, and is included in PHP5 installations by default. SQLite stores your SQL information in a single file that you can copy for backup or transfer purposes. That's cool! For anyone who doesn't feel comfortable dealing with backup scripts and database exports/imports, this is a great system. Your data is stored in a true SQL database with the inherent advantages of stability and reliability. But when you want to back up your database, all you do is copy the file via FTP. Couldn't be much simpler.
The LightNEasy administration area is basic and to-the-point, just the way I prefer it. To edit a page, log in. As soon as you log in, a tiny panel of three icons appears near the top of each page on the site. Just go to the page you want and click on the Edit icon. That opens the included TinyMCE editor. Make your changes, click Save, and you're done. Want to delete a page? Go to that page and click the Delete icon. The third icon takes you to the site setup area, where you can create new pages, modify the main and secondary menus, and change site-wide settings. After you make changes to the template, a Regenerate button here applies the modified template to all existing pages.
The menu system incorporated in LightNEasy works well. You have to manually add links to new pages via the menu setup area, but it uses a semi-graphical interface and makes perfect sense from the get-go. It's a good system that you will understand at a glance.
LightNEasy is a great CMS choice to get a site up and running quickly. But if you want more than a set of relatively static pages, or if you want more features, you may want to look elsewhere.
If you want to avoid the complexity of database, take a look at Matt's Micro Content Management System (MuCMS). It uses flat files for storage, but adds things like built-in statistics tracking. But building a design for it is more complicated, and the menu system is harder to grasp.
Check it out and grab a free copy at www.lightneasy.org
4/10/2008
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