Pluck offers the flat file goods

Pluck seems to be a fine flat file PHP content management system. I had trouble installing it last year, but gave it another try last week, and it installed without any trouble.

The control panel is very nice - both clean and logical. And it's fast. Pluck is designed as a CMS, but comes with a blog module built in, along with a gallery module. You can create a number of blogs and galleries with just a few clicks each. The script also includes a statistics area, but the stats are limited to just two - total site "hits" (actually, page views) and browser type (IE, Firefox, etc.). If you want more stats, just add the code for Google Analytics to the footer.

Installing a new theme is easy - just download a zip file of the theme you desire, and then use the Pluck control panel to install it. Just click "Install new theme" and use the dialog window to find the zip file. Then activate the new theme by using a pull-down menu. A couple dozen themes are available at the Pluck website, but unfortunately, most of them are quite similar. But I found a couple that I could live with. Fortunately, it is very easy to create your own theme for Pluck, since each theme consists only of two files - an index file and a css file. Since virtually everything is defined in the stylesheet (layout, columns, etc), the index file is extremely simple.

Pluck is also fairly search engine friendly. For each page you create, you can fill in blanks for META keywords and description. Page urls, however, do include a question mark, so they aren't perfectly search engine optimized. In my experience, this doesn't make a great difference to most search engines.

You can include an e-mail box in any page on a Pluck site to allow visitors to send you a message. Like the rest of the Pluck script, this is coded very cleanly and looks very nice in the various themes I tried.

Compared to other open source flat file content management systems, I rank Pluck quite high. It meets most of my personal criteria: fast, easy to install, no dependencies except PHP, logical control panel. The built-in blog engine and gallery creator add value, as does the e-mail form.

Categories: Flat File, Pluck

Etomite - Day two

After a couple of looks at my Etomite installation, I still like it.

One very interesting thing I discovered is Etomite's 'Edit Pages' function. Enter that area of the control panel, and you see a folder display of everything on your server. That's right, not just the Etomite files, but every file on your entire server. Using Etomite, I can view all the files in my Drupal, Joomla and other folders. Not only that, but you can edit most of them online. There's a built-in "safety" feature that prevents you from editing a few key types of files, including anything named "index.php". But it is very cool to be able to use this feature of Etomite as an online code editor for almost everything else on your server.

Etomite is a very capable CMS script. When you add a new page, you specify how and where you want it to appear in the sitewide menu. The menu administration is great. It is presented as a hierarchical list in outline format. To move items around, you simply click-and-drag them to the new location. Very slick.

Etomite is NOT a blog script. I haven't noticed any blogging feature. It is designed to be a content management system for static pages. At that, it excels. If you plan to include a blog on your Web site, you would be better off choosing a CMS that includes blogging as part of the core code, Drupal, WordPress or FlatPress, for example.

Etomite requires that PHP and MySQL exist on the server you install it on.

Categories: Etomite, online editing

Etomite

I installed Etomite on my test server last night. It's a fairly mature PHP and MySQL content management system. The install went smoothly. The installer tried, but could not create the database, so I did that manually with PHPMyAdmin. Then the installer completed its tasks in less than a minute.

At first glance, Etomite looks good. The admin interface is clean and is well organized. The default page template looks okay. It runs quickly. Adding a new page was fast, and it automatically appeared in the main public menu. It has some built-in search engine optimization features for each page.

I need to take a closer look at how to change templates, what variety of templates are available, how it behaves when adding different kinds of content.

But, so far, it looks worthwhile.

Categories: Etomite, MySQL

Pivot

I have had high hopes for the new version of Pivot, a blog engine that has a fairly long history. It has used flat files for storage, so it requires only PHP to work on any server.

I liked the test installation of version 1.45 I played with last year. But it was slow. The public pages were slow to load, and the administration pages were brutally slow.

The developers have been working on a major update for several months, and I tried version X alpha 3 earlier this spring. It was a improvement over version 1.45, but not enough to get me excited.

This weekend, I downloaded and installed version X2beta. One of the major changes to this new version is that it works with your choice of flat files or MySQL; an excellent choice to have. The install was effortless. The admin side work fast, and I was getting excited. But then I tried to view the home page of my test site, and couldn't. In the admin, I specified a certain content page as home. I double checked. I looked at all the user admin settings. I logged out. I tried another browser. I can't see the home page. No matter what I do, I see the admin login page. But I can't see any content.

Big disappointment. Guess I'll wait and see if the next beta, or the finished product, works correctly.

If it does, Pivot could be a player in my book. It offers many features. The new backend works fast, and is laid out logically and cleanly. In all, the admin interface is top notch. Now if I can just get a look at the public side!

Categories: Flat File, MySQL, pivot

WordPress 2.5 is terrific

WordPress is one of the most-used blog script systems in the English-speaking world. A new version, 2.5, has just been released. You can get a copy to install on your own server at www.wordpress.org. A companion site, www.wordpress.com, based on the same technology, is a free blog host service not unlike Blogger.

I've messed around with earlier versions of WordPress during the last year, and like it. It has proven stable, it has a large number of available plug-ins, and there are hundreds of templates for it, some of them very nice. This new version of the script makes WordPress even better.

The administrative interface is clean and makes sense. It runs fast on both the admin and the public sides. You can modify the template files on the fly via the admin control panel. Swapping in a different template takes just seconds.

Wordpress requires PHP and MySQL. Installation is a snap. As with most MySQL scripts, you need to use PHPMyAdmin or some other method to create a MySQL database before you run the Wordpress installer. From the time I downloaded the version 2.5 installer to typing my first post spanned less than 15 minutes, including the entire installation process and trying three different templates.

Though WordPress was designed a blog engine, it works fine as a CMS, too. You can create and edit static pages, just like in any CMS. There's a plug-in available that forces a static page to appear as the home page, so you can relegate the core blog to a secondary position. Other plug ins mold WordPress into the CMS function even further; there's even a self-contained package of several plug ins that purports to make WordPress into a CMS.

I give a thumbs up to WordPress 2.5.

Categories: MySQL, WordPress