The system now supports add-on modules and some have been included for a news feed (blog), photo galleries, etc.

Further, there are now decent user accounts with multiple levels of security access.

Image upload/management has been simplified, and the WYSIWIG editor which has been chosen “just works”. I’ve tried a few and this one is the probably the smoothest for non-tech end users.

Also, install is a snap.

Thank you very much for the comments.

Like I eluded to in the post, I definitely think that CompactCMS shows promise and look forward to seeing the headway that they will make against other, more established systems like you mention.

It can be a slippery slope between simplicity and feature-rich. But CompactCMS appears to be off to a great start.

Thanks again,

Mike

First of all: thank you so much for taking the time to review the CCMS project. I'm very glad that the philosophy behind the project is clear from the information offered. No extensiveness, just basic editing.

Your review gave me some new insights into the perceivement of the menu editor. I'll surely take a look at it to see whether I can make it more clear. Perhaps (e.g.) indent subpages under the parent. Perhaps I could also make a tutorial on how to port free templates to work with CompactCMS, hopefully making the user less dependant of designers. As an indication: I myself took the included templates from the web and had them working with CCMS under ten minutes.

In regard to the extensiveness: module support (guestbook, lightbox) has only been added 8 days ago. I sincerely hope that it users will pick up this new feature and start developing modules for the outside world.

So I'll definitely use your feedback to improve the project.

Thanks :)!

Xander.

I have built websites using solutions as simple as phpwebsite (originally a phpnuke fork), Typo3 (which we ditched before delivery), Infoglue, and currently, Oracle's Site Studio built on Universal Content Manager (UCM).

As with the creator of CCMS, I too began to look into some of the more popular open source cma solutions including Drupal and Joomla.

The simple fact, at the end of the day, is that small business owners don't want to learn new technology. They want to grow their business. Anything that keeps their job simple is worth it's weight in gold.

Just today 8 handed over the reigns on my latest CCMS installation to my client. Our user training session lasted about 30 minutes and that included everything from creating new content, linking pages together, maintaining muliple menus, uploading PDF documents and managing your uploaded files, uploading and inserting images and working with the the image library, creating tables and applying different styles to content elements simply by choosing class names from a dropdown box.

You'd be hard pressed to achieve that with non technical clients using any of the other systems mentioned.

I do agree he features are somewhat limited, but I think that falls back to the 80-20 rule: you can gr 80% of what you need done using 20% of the more fully fledged systems. CompactCMS is that 20% of the other systems, which is why it keeps everything simple.

But watch this space. The community has voiced it's desire for a number of common features and the development team does respond. I firmly believe you will start to see this leightweight make headway against some of the more popular platforms. It's a niche product for a specific market and it is a good fit for small business.

In addiion to the festers you mentioned, the system uses SEO-friendly URLs and scored 96, grade A, for speed optimization on Yahoo's Content Delivery Network tests (YSLOW).

Two more example sites, the second using a custom shop listing module that I developed, are found here:

http://schoolpride.com.au http://originalsbynada.com.au

Chris.