Free content management system, Open Source CMS

Free content management systems, Open Source CMS

PrattCMS - Open Source content management system

For More info on PrattCMS web content management solution visit the official webiste PrattCMS

PrattCMS (stands for People-Really-Adore-This-Technology Content-Management-System) is a powerful and easy to implement Content-Management-System. With a WYSIWYG HTML editor (What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get) that runs inline on both Mozilla, and Internet Explorer non-technical users can change content of the website (note: there is a text editor as part of the WYSIWYG editor for those users with HTML knowledge). PrattCMS is really a cobbling together of many different open-source technologies, including the Smarty Templating Engine, the PEAR database scripts, and (of course) PHP.

PrattCMS's main function is to provide an easy-to-administer web site that can handle large websites. It was created to be used by Homer's Pratt Museum on their ever-expanding website, and agreed by them to be developed as an open-source project.

PrattCMS will hopefully serve the open-source community well, and help some of the problems with current Content-Management-Systems. It's goal is to move away from a page entirely powered by HTML Forms, and to one that is more dynamically generated.

PrattCMS currently has the following features:

• A What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get HTML Editor (similar to MS Frontpage) that runs inline on both Microsoft IE (5.5+) and Mozilla (1.3+)
• A system that, while not using "register_globals" passes an id to the script, making for simple bookmarking and linking.
• A templating engine, namely Smarty that caches pages (on the server) for quicker loading later, and allows for seperation of presentation and logic. Smarty is included with PrattCMS, so no extra-installations are needed.
• The PEAR database scripts which allow for a very large range of databases to be supported. PEAR is included in the PrattCMS, so no extra installations are needed.
• A hierarchy editor to define the hierarchy of the site and the navigation thereof.
• A database administrator that uses PEAR to allow for hard-core database changes.
• A template changing system.
• A user administration that allows for user permissions. This makes it possible to define which sections of the website are allowed to be changed by which users.
• Module system.
• Test environment. This will allow you to have a production version and a test version for proofreading and an okay from other users. This might even be able to get the UserName and e-mail that person with a note about them needing to okay it. (in development)
• An installation script for easy installation of the PrattCMS.

PrattCMS is currently developing the following features to be used in release 1.0:

• A User Manual with examples and step-by-step instructions on use.

This is the list of projected features (already developed and in CVS) for 2.0:

• Simplified template code. Compiled PHPLayersMenu code (will be upgraded to latest stable version).
• Customizable variables in the "template" table. Template install file with DB variables.
• Comprehensive Statistics - With knowledge about each user, what country they are from (Using the IP-to-Country public database) what pages they accessed, most popular pages, entry pages, exit pages, referrels, etc.
  
• Upgrade Scripts to allow for patches to the code. This will likely be written in Perl, Batch, or Bash files. PHP Files are possible however, unlikely.
• Upgrade HTMLArea (the WYSIWYG editor) from the itools-htmlarea project. These changes will include added table support.
  
• Upgrades to the lates version of Smarty, PEAR::DB, PEART::Auth, and SQLView.
• The bottom include file will be editable from the "Config" Control Panel.
• Better Image handling/upload of images for the WYSIWYG editor.
• Context-Sensitive help for the admin section: there will be help buttons all over with links to the HTML formatted manual.
• Support for more databases. (This should already exist, however, testing has only been done using MySQL.)
  
• Optional benchmarking features to check how long page generation is taking. Will display "page generation took blabla milliseconds".
• Customizable Stylesheet Values
• Better Error Reporting: e-mails extensive error reports to developers, in lieu of a database query or connection error using the phpmailer class.

• Context-Sensitive help for the admin section: waiting on finish of writing User Manual.