DumbCMS 0.1b Finished

I have finally got round to finishing the preliminary version of DumbCMS at http://code.google.com/p/dumbcms/, however the following things are now targets:

• Get decent file manager
• Proper tag management on blog
• More color schemes (currently only has brown)
• More design layouts
• Better page management

DumbCMS 0.1b Launch List

OK, here is a list of planned features for Saturday's release of 0.1b:

• Pages with full HTML editing in admin
• Blog with post date, title, content and tags
• Blog view
• Color scheme picker
• Statistics logger:
• IP of visitor
• Which browser they are using
• What date the visited
• How many times they have visited
•  Everything stored in a MySQL database
• Fades between pages; accessed via AJAX
• Runs on PHP, MySQL, JavaScript, jQuery and simple HTML
• Extensible; it wouldn't be difficult to redesign it to suit your site

http://code.google.com/p/dumbcms/

DumbCMS Progress

I have almost finished work on DumbCMS - a new CMS that I am building. It will be released on Google Code by the end of the week, if not earlier. I will aim to get the files needed Zipped up and put in the downloads section first before adding all the source code up in full. The development of the project has proved to be surprisingly easy, it is just basic PHP and JavaScript - the only thing that has really proved difficult has been building up the admin options - these are actually quite complex and need to be protected from intrusion.

The plan will be that all the files are uploaded to the server and the user then runs a script (install.php) which will configure the database. Once that is done users will be able to modify their site from admin, or edit the source code for other pages.

At the moment the system will be able to log a huge variety of data on visiting users: you will be able to see which IPs are logging in, what browser they are using, what time of day they are browsing, which pages they are visiting and how many times they do so. This is all managed through an SQL table, and is also relatively easy to code. Note that admins will be able to turn off this feature because it could quickly fill up the SQL database limit, but if you wanted the insight it is always there.

When it is released (probably on Saturday), it will be released as version 0.1 beta, with the plan being for a full version being released by the end of June 2011. Whilst it won't be as feature rich as other CMS systems, it will be designed for people that want to be able to control the HTML side of their site whilst still being able to manage things such as the design.

At the moment everything works through two pages: index.php and page.php. The index file simply takes in the a parameter of which page the user is on and then uses an AJAX request to page.php to get the page content from a database. The advantage of working like this is that there can be complex jQuery animations between each page (OK, maybe not complex, but it slides and fades and looks quite cool!).