CMS (Content Management System) - useful tool, with which you can add and edit content on the site without programming knowledge, using a clear and simple external interface. In 2017, over a dozen CMS are available for creating online stores, blogs and other multi-page sites.

The most popular and well-known cms based on site statistics https://itrack.ru/:

But what about landig and other small sites? Below we will tell you about the solution to this problem.

One of our clients contacted our company with a request to add the ability to edit small text fragments of the site that we have developed for him.

The solution to the problem could be as follows:

"Let's just stretch the site to Wordpress."

At first glance, "pulling" a landing page on wordpress is good decision, after all, wordpress has over a dozen functions and the ability to edit text.

But in this case, the multifunctionality of this and other popular cms is a significant disadvantage. The fact is that for simple editing of text information on a site, wordpress is suitable, but pulls up a dozen unnecessary functions. For a better understanding, I will give an example from life:

You and your friends are going for a walk in the park and one of them, having come to the meeting, took a tent with him, gas burner, roaming, ax, shovel, fresh socks, etc. I think you have already understood that there is no particular need for these things to walk in the park. Chances are your buddy's approach is not suitable for walking in the park, with this approach it is better to go on weekly hikes. Likewise, Wordpress is not suitable for solving such simple and easy tasks due to the huge number of functions.

Having figured out the client's problem, we came to the decision to use lightweight and simple CMS, with which you can easily edit the site.

The selection of CMS was carried out according to the following criteria

Ease of use- an important criterion for cms: The presence of a convenient admin panel or the ability to install, and an intuitive interface.

- page loading speed, which may be more important than this.

DB (Databases)- the absence of a database is an important criterion in the selection of an easy and fast CMS.

Easy to install- no one likes to sit for hours installing CMS

MicroText

Free and lightweight website engine. No database required. It works quickly and the load on the server is minimal. Installation takes an average of 5 minutes. There is a flexible configuration of the system, thanks to which you can easily assemble a simple blog. The authors of the project are responsive and regularly release updates.

System advantages

Flexibility

Ease

Fast installation

A system for editing sites based on static HTML files. Great for sites where you need to change only text information, all changes are saved in HTML files. It works without a database and is easy to install - just place the directory with the system at the root of the site. For normal operation of the system, you need an Apache web server with PHP version 5.2 or higher and a valid mod_rewrite module. On the official website there is an online demo version, you just need to click on the "Login" button. It is worth noting the presence of a convenient and intuitive admin panel with a visual editor and a code editor for more serious site manipulation.

Screenshot CMS - Textolite

pros

Easy installation

Ease of the system

Work speed

Convenient and intuitive admin panel

It is one of the most popular Flat-file CMS. Pico is a fairly lightweight CMS - it weighs 372 kb when archived. Pico uses md files as content storage. Due to this, as well as simplified functionality, page loading is almost lightning fast. Pico uses the Markdown markup language, which allows you to edit the site in any text editor... Out of the box, pico has a few basic features and does not even represent the admin panel, you can install it as a plugin.

Screenshot CMS - Pico CMS

pros

Work speed

True, there is one drawback - the lack of an external interface

Grav

Another CMS from Flat-file representatives. Easy installation: unpack the archive with the CMS to the root of the project and that's it, then just the setup. Grav is capable of image editing: resizing, cropping, effects and caching. Grav is the line between lightweight static sites and feature-rich blogs.

CMS Screenshot - Grav CMS

pros

Built-in image editor

Flexible architecture and open source allow developers to create a huge number of plugins

Jekyll

CMS from the creators of GitHub, focuses on lightweight blogging, the system runs in Ruby, which distinguishes it from the other CMS mentioned.

CMS Screenshot - Jekyll CMS

pros

The site will be stored in the git repository

Since the site is stored in a git repository, you don't have to worry about hosting reliability

Large community

Jekyll supports, in addition to html, textile and markdown

High speed work

Based on the task at hand, Textolite CMS was perfect.

We were able to instantly implement it into the client's website and easily customize it to the client's needs. We hope this article was helpful and you will use them for your own purposes.

If you know more worthy CMSs, then we would be glad if you told about them in the comments.

Instead of an afterword

Below we have made a table by which you can easily choose the most suitable CMS for you.

An important question arises for newcomers to the Internet business - the choice of an engine for a blog.

I think you know that the engine is a CMS (Content Management System) or, translating into Russian, a site content management system. Actually, CMS is your site. Thanks to her, you can create a blog design, as well as fill it with content.

Choose your engine correctly

What to focus on when choosing a blogging platform (engine)? It is important for a beginner to pay attention to several features:

1) programming language. Although most engines use PHP or Rails, today you can find software written in any of the programming languages. Choose the one that is at least a little familiar to you;

2) properties. Based on what kind of blog you need, choose an engine with certain properties;

3) the size of the community of this software. The larger it is, the more often the software is updated and the better its support team works;

4) age of the platform. The higher it is, the better the engine is. Young engines have a lot of incompleteness;

5) plans for the future. In order not to suffer later with the transfer of the site, it is better to immediately choose a lightweight blog engine, which will be convenient to expand your horizons.

Best website engines

Now more specifically. Here are the most popular and user-friendly blog engines.

1. WordPress. Perhaps this is the best blog engine. 90% of newbies use it. Its main advantages over others are:

1) free of charge;

2) extremely lightweight and user-friendly interface;

3) functionality.

Even a user who is not familiar with the programming language will understand everything. With this engine, you can create your blog from scratch in just a couple of hours.

However, you shouldn't use WordPress for online stores.

2. Drupal. One of the most famous software. Its advantages are as follows:

1) versatility;

2) free of charge;

3) a wide range of templates.

The only downside is that when working with this site, it is desirable to have at least basic programming knowledge and a lot of space on the resource.

3. Joomla. Also on hearing from the users of the World Wide Web. Jomla is perfect for creating online store... The advantages of this software are as follows:

1) convenient and intuitive interface;

2) a lot of templates;

3) functionality.

However, the setup is tricky for a beginner. In addition, the engine itself occasionally slows down.

4. Movable Type. The most "ancient" software. It was developed in 2001. Considered an excellent blogging platform. Of the pros:

1) user-friendly interface;

2) easy installation;

3) uses few resources.

Of the minuses - it is very rarely updated, the support team is only in foreign languages.

5. Textpattern. It is a simple blog engine. You can even call it a "notebook". Of the merits:

1) ease of use;

2) easy installation;

3) no load on the server.

Textpattern has too few templates, is rarely updated, and has no modifications at all. Although for creating a simple blog without all sorts of troubles, it will do very well.

Other site engines

There are other blogging platforms out there. When choosing an engine for your blog, you should consider all the options.

1. E2. Convenient, free and functional, but young and little-known software.
2. DLE Bitrix. A paid and promising engine.
3. B2evolution. It is quite convenient and free, but complex program.
4. LastoBlog. Paid, but quite functional software with a wide range of templates.
5. InTerra Blog Machine. Unusual, free and the fastest blogging platform on the Internet.
6. ExpressionEngine. Paid, but reliable and easy-to-use engine.
7. Nucleus CMS. Free and creative relatively young software.
8. Serendipity. Excellent free platform with automatic update, which is extremely convenient and pleasant.
9. Mephisto. A simple, but little-functional free engine.
10. Symphony. Software for web developers. Requires deep programming knowledge.
11. Habari. A complex but interesting engine. You can try it for the sake of gaining experience with complex programs.
12. Pixie. Lightweight and easy-to-use free platform.

Finally

Personally, I, like many other bloggers, recommend the WordPress site engine. It is the easiest to learn, especially for those who are faced with creating a blog for the first time. Therefore, I think that the choice is obvious 😉 Although, experiment and choose the best engine that suits you.

I have compiled for myself a distribution kit of the BlogEngine.NET blogging engine (version 1.5.0.7), ready for deployment on hosting in seconds and russified as I need it (ranging from slugs to many translation improvements in a special file and the code itself, including extensions), with various extensions and a large package of themes, but I thought that maybe someone else will find it useful.
Further: for those who do not know what BlogEngine.NET is and what it is eaten with - perhaps the story about it will be interesting, for those who are "in the know" - a list of changes made in the engine.

What BlogEngine is not?

BlogEngine is not Wordpress. I repeat: this is not Wordpress. Of course, it's tempting to compare them (in general, the best blogging engines on two different platforms). But BlogEngine is an engine of a different class: not so extensible with ready-made plugins (although your own can be written quite quickly and simply), but as lightweight and fast as possible, providing more functionality than is necessary for an ordinary blogger (not playing with his blog, but simply writing it) ...
It shouldn't be used where any feature might be needed: unless you really want to learn ASP.NET by writing the UserControls and extensions you need, but when you want something lightweight, quick to deploy, it's easy customizable, user-friendly (the BlogEngine dashboard is much simpler and lighter than the Wordpress dashboard "a) - then it makes sense to try BlogEngine. In the FAQ "e of developers there is a question" Can my mom use it? ":) The answer is yes, she can. Everything is quite simple and intuitive for both the user and the developer. For a developer, in general, it is enough to download the project posted on the official website in Visual Studio and enjoy the convenience of working with beautifully written code :)

What can he do out of the box?

1. Work fine with caching (without bothering the user), mobile devices(they are given a special theme by default), trackbacks, pingbacks and even OpenSearch (blog search can be inserted into the search bar of modern browsers in addition to Yandex, Google, Bing, etc.)
2. Tree comments, gravatars, comment notification by mail, ping services
3. Multi-author blogging, detailed author profiles
4. Widgets for the cloud of tags, twitter, favorite blogs, notification of new posts by mail, drag-n-drop work with these widgets
5. Auto-resize uploaded images
6. Using bbcode in comments, previewing comments
7. MP3 audio player based on Flash technology
8. and many many others!

And most importantly, all of this is easy to manage, and the possibilities do not slow down the blog's work at all. Instant installation and minimal system requirements- also a serious advantage. Even an installer is not required, see below :)

Windows hosting is expensive !!

Nothing of the kind: many serious companies offer Unix and Windows hosting for the same price. Moreover: Windows hosting usually has a trial period. Personally, I am satisfied with Windows hosting from Infobox and Agave, but I do not insist at all. In addition, BlogEngine.NET requires much less powerful hosting than Wordpress.

Who will benefit from this?

If you are just interested in the ASP.NET platform, then this is a good constructor to start with. The BlogEngine code is written beautifully and easily, it is quite understandable even without special training in the field of .NET technology. You can freely dig into it and correct it for yourself without any problems, at the same time gradually understanding ASP.NET. If you've never worked with ASP.NET but would like to give it a try - just play around without trying to write your own CMS from scratch - try BlogEngine, you won't regret it. On its basis, it is quite possible to make your own CMS, everything is ready for an ordinary non-blog CMS (NB ready does not mean done ;-) For example, there is support for tree-like page organization in the control panel, but for the site itself you will have to code it yourself).

Installation

BlogEngine works without a database (although it is quite possible to connect it) and for installation you only need to upload to the hosting and specify write permissions for the App_Data folder. Then load the main page; the first time it will load longer, but then everything will happen quickly.

What's changed in this build?

1. The official translation in the file has been seriously supplemented and corrected \ App_GlobalResources \ labels.ru.resx
2. Where possible - the names are translated directly in the code (since not everything is taken out in separate file, and not everything is possible to endure without a lot of changes in the engine; hopefully someday this will change)
3. \ bin \ BlogEngineCore.dll rebuilt. Now Russian headers do not turn into slug "and like d09ed0b1d0be-d0bcd0bdd0b5(a headache for BlogEngine, because you cannot turn off rewriting of urls here), but are shown directly in Russian letters (a la Wikipedia). Personally, I like it so much :) But as a last resort, the assembly also includes a plugin for transliterating the slugs for posts (unfortunately, this does not apply to categories and tags, so the solution did not suit me completely ...)
4. Added fully Russian version of TinyMCE instead of English
5. A large number of extensions have been added, all are translated.
6. The assembly comes with 50 different themes. They have not been Russified, nevertheless, very few changes are required there (on average, much less than in Wordpress themes; the simpler arranged code affects); I think that this will not be a problem, although I plan to translate them in the future , if required

What else needs to be done

1. Not just translate, but translate the engine with high quality, especially the control panel. Remove discrepancies in terms (I confess, there is no end to work ...), and in some places and correct the code for correct translation.
2. Translate topics (at least a few)
3. Improve, improve and improve BlogEngine again :) In general, I would like all translation to go through only one file in the future - and then the site would be automatically translated into the language of the logged in user without tambourines (ASP.NET technology allows this out of the box). Beauty:)

Finally why did I do it

It's simple: you yourself needed to have at hand a ready-to-install distribution of the blogging engine for ASP.NET, Russified enough to put control in the hands of a simple user. So that there are already themes and extensions. Those extensions for which you do not need to write UserControls into themes. This, of course, is not difficult, but not for this case :)
Since BlogEngine has enough problems from scratch in the Russian-speaking spaces, and moreover, not all problems are solved by editing scripts (for something you need to rebuild the kernel, and here not everyone will open Microsoft Visual Studio for this ...), then I rummaged, I corrected it - and laid it out.
Even if no one needs it (after all, we have little use of ASP.NET in such a "light" segment of the web, and it's a pity, it's a very good technology), then at least I do. :)

Download, if anyone is interested, you can

Ghost is the best blogging engine for singles and small businesses. It has recently been updated to version 1.0, which is great.

Ghost fits perfectly between cloud platforms (Medium, Tilda, Blogspot) and WordPress. It's simple, user-friendly, has tons of features out of the box, and is highly customizable.

Version 1.0 was released at the end of July. The development team sawed through it all year - they corrected design flaws and laid the foundation for further development. IN new version The editor was reworked (although it was not bad anyway), a bunch of small features were added, but the main changes were under the hood. The authors say that thanks to them, the Gost will develop faster. Let's see ツ

I'll tell you about some of the Gost's features.

Convenient to write and publish

The editor supports Markdown with all the bells and whistles like pictures, tables, highlighting and source codes. You write and immediately see the result:

All sorts of SEO stuff included out of the box: Google AMP, permalinks, sitemap. You don't have to think about this bullshit at all, it just works.

85% of readers come to the blog from social networks, and Gost helps to set up everything to attract them

Subscription to updates via RSS, email and Slack works.

If you add static pages (for example, home, projects and "about yourself") - you get a full-fledged site, not just a blog. This is how my site is made.

Convenient to customize

There are hundreds of ready-made themes for Gost - paid and free. Better yet, making your theme as easy as shelling pears - clear syntax, plus the guys made a website with detailed documentation.

Whatever your heart desires is adjusted. For example, show notes with photos as mini-thumbnails, and articles as annotations. Or do separate page about travel. Or do not show notes marked with a secret tag. And this is without digging in the giblets of the engine. The authors have well thought out and described the API, it is enough for any imagination.

Convenient for business

Gost is fully open under the MIT license. This means that it is free for commercial use and allows any modification.

Today we are going to talk about the blog engine.

Equally legitimate is the question: is it possible to have a blog without a mailing list? Can. But why?

Blog support is also work aimed at developing and supporting your brand.

Moreover, when each of them is on his own, it is like a bucket of water in one hand ... And when they are in a pair, this is a completely different conversation - this is a rocker.

There are two reasons for this:

1. The blog and the newsletter should be filled with useful information. Why not do it with one blow? The SubScribe service is so good that it not only allows you to simultaneously send your message to three mailing servers, but also that it is capable of on my own once a week, take materials from your site (if it supports such a function), generate a letter, upload your design and send all this beautifully formed issue to all three servers. How does it feel? You yourself quietly maintain your website (blog), and once a week your subscribers receive the next issue of the mailing list with the next portion of useful things. All curious and curious! How smart these guys are programmers!
2. The site needs to be promoted and the newsletter needs to be promoted. Their promotion methods are different. But when they are in a pair, they work for each other's success - the most powerful tandem turns out. None search system(and usually they are the main providers of traffic to the site) will not give you visitors in the first month - this is unrealistic. And the mailing will give. And constantly from the mailing list, not random surfers, as from search engines, will come to your site, but your like-minded people - a constant stream of the target audience

This is a screenshot of a survey that I conducted on the site in June. See? The main provider of traffic to the site is newsletter.

which engine to take for a blog which to choose.

So,

Free blog engine

Pros:

• no need to pay
• open source
• many free modules

Minuses:

Paid blog engine

Pros:

• taking into account the wishes of customers
• vulnerability minimized

Minuses:

• you have to pay for them

Open SLAED

So, people need a blog. It remains to find out the technical points: which engine to take for a blog so that you can import news and which to choose.

Today we will discuss engines for blogs, tomorrow hosting.

So, CMS (Content Management System) Is a content management system for the site. Most often, CMS is translated as a content management system or site engine.

1. Website development using CMS does not require any special knowledge and skills.
2. You can make a website on CMS in just a couple of hours - saving time.
3. If you choose a popular CMS, then you can usually find a wide variety of templates and additional modules for it that further expand the functionality, as well as get advice on setting up, installing and solving certain problems from the community of developers and users of this CMS.

It remains to find out which blog engine to choose: paid or free?

Free blog engine

Pros:

• no need to pay
• open source
• many free modules
• the collective mind of members of the forum - supporters of this engine

Minuses:

• a vulnerability that lovers of searching for various holes can take advantage of.
• no guarantees for any free CMS.
• no one will provide qualified assistance.

Paid blog engine

Pros:

• professional technical support
• taking into account the wishes of customers
• vulnerability minimized

Minuses:

• you have to pay for them

What should you choose? It depends on why.

Free engines are better suited for blogs and information portals. When the portal outgrows, becomes serious and starts to make a profit, it is better to transfer it to a commercial CMS, again due to vulnerabilities.

However, if you create an online store or any other project on which you will post valuable information that constitutes a trade secret, or other data that is not subject to disclosure, then free CMS is excluded. Because the losses incurred by hacking it will many times exceed the amounts spent on purchasing and configuring the engine.

As I understand it, there are not many people here who want to open their own store, so we will focus on free engines.

If I am mistaken, and you still want advice on commercial engines, write, I will advise what to pay attention to and what not to.

Of the free, it is worth paying attention to four CMS: Open Slaed, WordPress, Joomla and Drupal because we are interested in the ability to import news into a mailing list service.

Open SLAED

Open SLAED is a flexible, powerful and intuitive system with minimal hosting requirements and a high level of protection.

If you want your portal that can be customized with the click of a mouse, Open SLAED is an excellent choice.

Easy to install, easy to administer, easy to use.

WordPress

A very popular CMS in runet and the world, especially among beginners. WordPress allows you to create websites different types, informational, news, etc., but still, when they talk about WordPress, they mean that it is, first of all, a blogging engine. In the blogging class, WordPress is the undisputed leader.

If you want to easily and quickly create your blog, or, which is practically the same, an uncomplicated informational type site to which you will periodically add new articles and allow users to comment on them, then WordPress is the ideal choice.

The famous "install in 5 minutes", easy to use, popular.

Another popular CMS, sites are often made on it. It is somewhat more difficult to learn than WordPress, but it also has a wider scope of application. A huge number of modules have been developed for Joomla, including chats, blogs, online stores, etc., so you can safely try to make a complex multifunctional site on it. In general, on Joomla, you can make a variety of sites, both simple and complex, this is a universal CMS.

More difficult to install and use than the first two.

This CMS is suitable for creating forums, blogs (including multiuser ones), online encyclopedias, community sites. However, this system can hardly be called universal.

Comparing Drupal with the rest, we can unequivocally say the following - this CMS is not for those who want to create a website quickly and easily by installing and immediately receiving it. Drupal is more convenient for those who are ready to sit and carefully build the structure of the site in order to get what they need, but not for those who are used to simple solutions newbies. This feature scares away from Drupal those who do not want to bother with all this complexity, but attracts those who love flexibility and love to experiment.

Enough for today, I think. Think carefully about what I told you today: since you are still running the mailing list, why not make it even more comfortable?