When you are looking for a CMS, there are many factors to consider. Obviously, the feature it has is one of them. However, you also need to consider your skill level because when you are a beginner, you can’t take advantage of all the advanced features a CMS can offer. If you are a beginner looking for a CMS, or if you are an expert who needs to recommend a CMS to beginners, here are 7 essential features to consider [...]

I’ve been working with Content Management Systems, both bespoke and open source for over 7 years. In that time a lot has changed as to how flexible and adaptive CMSs can be, but there are still times when a CMS can be restrictive. Each CMS brings with it its own advantages and also its own disadvantages. Having primarily worked in large organisations such as universities, I’ve found that, at times a CMS can do exactly the opposite of its intentions [...]

While WordPress (using the numerous portfolio themes and plugins) has become a very popular choice for creating photo blogs or online portfolios, sometimes you may just need a dedicated CMS in order to create a web gallery. In this article, we shall take a look at some photo gallery CMSes. While this list clearly is not exhaustive, and there are several other CMS options available, following CMSes have a decent user base and continue to be in active development. Alkaline [...]

Let’s face it, WordPress is the demi-god of blogging and (arguably) Content Management. From Syria to Korea, WordPress powers them all. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t other fish in the sea. Even if you are in love with WordPress (just as we are), trying out a taste of variety won’t harm you a bit. So lets check out some awesome alternatives to WordPress. CMS/Publishing Tools Bluntly put, WordPress isn’t a CMS in its own right. But its heavy duty [...]

CouchCMS is a self-hosted simple CMS that has been created specifically with web designers in mind. It allows a designer to take any HTML/CSS templates and convert it into a fully content managed site, quite literally in minutes. Unlike most other CMSs out there, Couch works by being retrofitted within an existing design or static site and not vice versa. This gives unparalleled creative freedom to designers who will no longer need to design their layouts around the limitations of [...]

Thanks to the active opensource CMS community, especially the big three (WordPress, Joomla and Drupal) website development cost has dwindled down to affordable levels. The more you understand how to use a CMS the better you can control development cost and best make use of your site to promote your products or services. For people like me who has close to zero code nor design skills the most important thing when creating a new site is to get content published [...]

Whether you’re a small business owner or just someone with a steadily growing site, choosing the right CMS can mean the difference between flourishing or floundering. Rather than rate individual CMS’s, this article will highlight areas in which your chosen CMS must excel.

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. [...]

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Grid based layout designs can be very useful for building structured, usable and content rich (not limited to) websites. Grid design certainly has some major benefits for developers (its really easy to to plan where things should go), but its real power lies in what it can do for your readers and users. With a structured grid layout, an everyday user visiting your site can quickly understand and locate the content they want making it very obvious for users to [...]

An all singing and all dancing CMS (who uses all of there features anyway?) is not always the best option for every web design project, sometimes all you need is something with a little less punch, something with a smaller learning curve and something that is really, really light. All of the CMSes below can be regarded as ‘light’, that’s not to say they are lightweights, but what they are is a simpler system, for you and your clients, to [...]

A few months ago we published a popular article called 12 Useful and Free Downloadable Web Design Books, and the positive response we received from our readers was phenomenal. But, just as there is with most things, there is always room for improvement. With the help of readers and authors we have discovered another 9 free web design books we felt were worthy enough to bring to your attention, you will find these book below. Just as with the previous [...]

Despite the rumors, Flash websites are still very much popular. Flash does provide a unique and rich user experience with its amazing animations, unique effects, its somewhat genius interactivity. Yes, Flash can be beautiful, but it is also very difficult to learn and is certainly very difficult to easily update (especially for clients) and maintain. For the past few years Flash developers have been struggling to create a powerful and intuitive content management system, which would allow the developer to [...]