The Awesome Croogo – Free and Open-Source PHP CMS

by CMS, Web Apps, Web Design

Croogo is a free, open source, content management system for PHP. It is built on top of the popular MVC framework CakePHP and is targeted towards developers, designers and administrators. It was first released on October 2009 by Fahad Ibnay Heylaal, and continued to see 6 more releases in less than a year. The project is currently at version 1.3.2 beta, and is being actively developed.

This is our new weekly column were we highlight our favorite FREE web apps. It is not your typical review post, what we have done instead is approached the lead-developer from each app and asked them to give us some background information, describing some of the apps features and how it will benefit our readers.
The overall aim of this column is to give some well earned exposure to selected start-up web apps or awesome apps that have been sadly ignored and deserve a little boost.

Screenshot

Outstanding Croogo Features

The project has taken a lot of inspiration from the big three CMSes: WordPress, Drupal and Joomla!. Croogo has most of the features that you would expect in a decent CMS to make things easier for you. Some of the features mentioned below:

  • • Content: You can create your own content types. Default types are blog, page and node.
  • • Taxonomy: Categorization of your content
  • • WYSIWYG editor: (with integrated file/image uploads)
  • • Custom Fields for content
  • • Multilingual: content in multiple languages (i18n)
  • • Comments with threads and spam protection
  • • Syndication (RSS feeds)
  • • Menu manager
  • • Blocks
  • • Contact forms with spam protection
  • • File manager and Attachments
  • • User management includes ACL management for setting role-based permissions
  • • Themes
  • • Plugins
  • • Extensions manager: manages uploading and activation of Plugins, Themes and Language packs
  • • Web based installer

Croogo Screenshots

Content list

Content list

Edit content

Edit content

Blocks

Blocks

Getting Started with Croogo

Developers Conclusion

The project is in still in beta, but is used by a number of websites ranging from beautifully designed blogs to portfolios to busy e-commerce websites already. According to the roadmap, next version will see a major redesign of the admin panel to make it more usable and accessible to administrators. But the code base is pretty much stable, and the community behind it is starting to contribute plugins and themes helping extend the core.

Author: (566 Posts)

Paul Andrew is the editor and founder of Speckyboy Design Magazine. You can follow Speckyboy on Twitter, on Facebook, on Digg or you can subscribe via RSS.

  • http://www.etcwd.com web design resources

    it seems to be nice and easy. I’ll try it. thanks

  • http://www.thecodebakery.com Web Technology News

    The number of plugins being developed for this software is a great testimonial to the core of Croogo itself.

    I highly recommend this software and can see it having a bright future. Also more press to CakePHP which is great!

  • http://www.fastdesigning.com Rashid Rupani

    Very much wordpress look, Few plugins and only 2 themes available.

    but the question is why we move to new cms when we have WordPress, Joomla and Drupal. What differentiate Croogo with all popular CMS

  • http://www.touchlingerie.co.uk Ian

    For me any Open Source CMS is only as good as the community behind it. But then I’m a bit of a php novice and use WordPress/Joomla to avoid the code wherever possible.

    Bit of a catch-22 as I wouldn’t ‘buy in’ to a CMS without a substantial community around it, but then if everyone were to think like me then nothing would ever get off the ground!

    Will be interesting to see how it goes as WordPress is still too blog oriented (at least out-of-the-box) for some applications and Joomla can be overkill.

  • Criminal Smith

    Is this some kind of paid review to gain advertising?

    It looks like something that could be knocked out using ASP.net MVC/Entity Framework in less than a week.

    In fact after the design of the DB 90% of if could be achieved by just right clicking.

    • apaulandrew

      I can confirm this post is categorically not a paid review.

      Thanks for your comment, Paul (Admin).

  • http://www.hastishah.com Hastimal Shah

    Nice to see new CMS..
    Lets try it once.
    But i prefer to go with wordpress only.

  • http://dominikhahn.com Dominik H.

    WordPress does not belong to the ‘big three CMSes’. Hell, it’s not even a proper CMS…

    Besides that I don’t see why Croogo is that great. It looks like WordPress and why would I even need a commenting feature in a CMS?

    Take a look at TYPO3, the only CMS you will ever need. It’s not super easy but it does what it promises.

  • http://www.lakeside.com.np Lakeside Technologies

    This sounds pretty promising, we hope they release a full version soon.

  • http://www.puntopeek.com Tomas

    I played a bit with this CMS, but it seems too simple, for me it lacks many features.

    I recommend you try it with concrete5, I felt very good, but… is not wordpress!

  • Mike

    From what I can see the point of this CMS has been missed by the original article and a lot of the comments. What makes this special is not the features included but the fact that it is written in CakePHP, which means developers can easily extend it and can also use the massive library of plugins, extensions, behaviour that are available for Cake. Also in terms of communities the CakePHP community is very big.
    I’m not really a fan of content management systems like Joomla and WordPress because too many people are forcing there application design to fit the CMS, where the technology should fit the application.
    Croogo seems to offer a skeleton CMS based around a very easy to learn framework.

  • Marko

    Croogo is great. It’s like a cherry on top of CakePHP.
    If you are the end user, you should probably select another system, but for developers this is it…

  • http://www.martincourchesne.com Martin

    Can someone tell me how to install Croogo on localhost … I always get that message : The requested URL /croogo-1.3.2/install/install/database was not found on this server.

    It seems that it missing some folder in the download package I get from their website …

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  • http://www.itkariera.com ITKariera

    Free Croogo Themes Download

    We hope you will enjoy these FREE themes adapted for Croogo!

    Read credits inside archives. Themes tested on Croogo v1.3.1 Beta

    http://www.itkariera.com/croogo/

    theme1 – Premium News Theme
    description: WordPress News Theme for Croogo, 6 color versions

    theme2 – Simplo
    description: 6 color styles WP Blog Theme for Croogo
    note: change color style in default.ctp

    theme3 – Rockwell
    description: 3 color schemes theme for Croogo

    theme4 – Aurelius
    description: nice features 2 column theme for Croogo

    theme5 – Monobook
    description: MediaWiki/Wikipedia like theme for Croogo

    theme6 – myTheme
    description: Basic Newspaper style theme for Croogo

    theme7 – twoColumnNews
    description: Newspaper Theme for Croogo

  • Wolfgang

    i tried to install CROOGO on a LAMP system where some other CMS are running without any problems (mod_rewrite is active) and i also just get the message:
    The requested URL /install/install/database was not found on this server.

    the google-group is not reachable (just get a timeout) and the author does not give support (i mailed to him twice).

    who can give me some helpful tips to fix this problem?

    • http://fahad19.com Fahad

      Croogo’s Google Group consists of 200+ members and always active with discussions, no reason why you should not be able to reach it.

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  • http://superdit.com aditia

    from the screenshot the design it seems like the wordpress admin

  • Joe

    I took a look at the demo and the way they do menus is ridiculous. You pretty much need to know the name of a controller and task, etc. The only thing that you can easily create links for are the “articles” and a standard outside url. I’m not gonna put any more attention on it for a while until they have a better system that is more usable by non-technical people.

  • Asathoor

    Well I just can’t get it up and running. So that’s it – next cms, please…

  • Raghavendrabsrg

    which CMS does this website use??

    • Ariaan Bruinsma

      try /wp-admin ;)

  • Huhuhu

    I see a lot of comment complaining about the difficulty level of the cms, but i would just like to add, cms’s that are easy to set up and understand by novel users are not necessarily good. The fact that you are limited by your own knowledge of a technology does not make that technology good or bad, it is just not right for you. 

  • http://www.facebook.com/araviski Alain Richard

    Really really great CMS ! Thank you for sharing