frog cms

This week we added three Web applications to our CMS Focus top 30 list.  The CMSs and ECMs listed in CMS Focus are not necessarily the most popular in content management and are not meant to meet everyone's requirements for a CMS. Instead the content management systems that make up this top 30 are what I consider content management "game changers" or "attention getters". New to CMS Focus are the following CMS/ECM: EPiServer, Umbraco, and an unknown CMS called Omeka.

My thanks to all those that made their suggestions to me via Twitter. Besides the three CMS that made the top 30 list, we had enough tweets to call our attention to Enano, Coremedia, Alterian, OpenCMS, SDL Tridion, Jahia, and Nuxeo. I wouldn't be surprised to see some of these additional CMSs making their way onto CMS Focus in the near future.

In order to make room the new entries, we dropped three Web applications out of CMS Focus and into our "Hall of Fame". These applications were Gallery (2006-2010), Frog CMS (2009-2010), and SMF (2006 - 2009). All three applications are fine pieces of softweare for what they are designed to do and are still be worth a look. However, our focus continues to shift to more complete information systems and retirement to the hall of fame were long overdue for these applications.

I recently added Frog CMS and Socialtext to CMS Report's CMS Focus page.  CMS Focus is a list of the top 30 Web applications that represent what I feel are the Web applications of today and tomorrow.  In a world where niche CMS news sites try to cover it all for their readers (more power to them), I feel one of the strengths of CMSReport.com is limiting our focus on a certain number of CMS.  The CMS on this list are applications I recommend site owners first look at before moving into the deep waters of content management and social software.

As I mentioned late last year, my latest obsession is the implementation and use of CMS and social software in the enterprise.  For many organizations it can be more challenging to implement content management and collaboration solutions on their own Intranet than it is for the Web.  Wanting to continue expanding our topics on Enterprise 2.0 is why I've put Socialtext on the list.  Frankly, I'm learning about Socialtext just as much as everyone.  Instead of putting Socialtext into CMS Focus, I did consider Opentext and even Ektron.  Socialtext made the list because they seemed to be more transparent with news about their product.  My advice to companies and their Web sites...keep those RRS feeds updated and accessible.

Occasionally, I see a post that I have written as a reference in a white paper, a book, or somewhere else online.  I actually started CMSReport.com as a place for me to learn more about Web content management systems and information systems.  Whenever someone references CMS Report it signals that we have gone full circle where someone is also learning from me.  There is not a more awesome feeling than this.

One thing I have yet to achieve is being a legitimate reference at Wikipedia.  Until now!  CMS Report is being referenced on the wiki page for Frog CMS.

1. ^ "phpRadiant to imitate Radiant CMS" (2007-01-04). Retrieved on 2008-04-28.

For those that do not not know, phpRadiant was the original project name for this current Frog CMS.  Frog CMS was inspired by the Ruby on Rails application, Radiant CMS.   Naturally, after two years in development, the developers for Frog CMS have become inspired with their own roadmap for building this CMS.  Frog is currently available at version 0.9.5 from the Frog CMS download page.

Philippe Archambault wrote to us that he is working on a PHP version of Radiant CMS. Radiant CMS is based on the Ruby language. Mr. Archambault has appropriately named his CMS, phpRadiant. If imitation is a sincere form of flattery, then lets hope the Radiant CMS folks are blushing!

Mr. Archambault isn't the first person to suggest taking what they liked in Radiant CMS and migrating it from the Ruby language to one that is PHP based. However, his project is the first one that I know about which has actually seen the light of day.

So far I've mostly posted here at CMS Report about PHP-based content management systems. However, PHP isn't the only language being used on the Web. Other Web friendly languages include Perl, Java, Ruby, ASP, Python, etc.

So for one of our first non-PHP based CMS we're going to take a look at Radiant. The Radiant CMS is a Ruby on Rails CMS that has yet to reach version 1.0. Like a lot of CMS in early development it is considered a "no fluff" CMS for small teams. In other words, Radiant is not quite ready for enterprise level work. Radiant however may work well for those personal sites and small companies that have an invested interest to promote Ruby on Rails based applications.

Current features of Radiant, according to its home Website, include:

• An elegant user interface
• The ability to arrange pages in a hierarchy
• Flexible templating with layouts, snippets, page parts, and a custom tagging language (Radius)
• Special page-oriented plugins called behaviors
• A simple user management/permissions system
• Support for Markdown and Textile as well as traditional HTML (it's easy to create other filters)
• Operates in two modes: dev and production depending on the URL
• A caching system which expires pages every 5 minutes
• Built using Ruby on Rails (which means that extending Radiant is as easy as any other Rails application)
• Licensed under the MIT license
• And much more...

The latest version of Radiant is 0.5 and is available for download.