FrogCMS – Content Management Simplified.

By: Chris Murphy

I don't normally blog about content management systems as these kinds of posts tend to degenerate into a my-cms-is-better-than-yours-palooza, but I wanted to give a shout out to a project that has been in the works for almost two years and has finally matured into something worth talking about.

Content Management Systems come in so many flavours, and while I don’t advocate any one system over another, I have no hesitation in saying that this product is one to keep an eye out for. Created by Quebec-based developer, Philippe Archambault , FrogCMS is one of the few I would include in my web-designer’s toolbox. The system is not inherently original in it’s approach, being a derivative/port of another popular system called RadianCMS (developed on the Ruby Framework), but like RadiantCMS, it’s approach does appear to live up to it’s promise in simplifying the task of developing a scalable website by abstracting the components of a website into simple concepts: “pages”, “snippets”, “layouts”, “files”, and “comments”.

Here are a few screenshots of the product:

Features

Here are some of the features from the website:

Unlimited hierarchically structured page navigation menu
The page navigation menu provides critical information and functions. It allows you to perform quickly common actions on pages and shows how information has been organized.

Drag and drop page ordering
This function simplifies the organization of your site’s pages. It makes new sorting arrangements of pages possible.

Flexible page content: body, sidebar, extended, summary
Each page can have its own customized parts (divisions). It can be ‘extended’ text for news, or ‘summary’ for article: you can define whatever you want, whenever you want. These can even be used for extended metadata fields.

Per page layout customization
Pages can have their own layout, or can inherit the layout of the parent page, or they can reuse another page layout. This allows the site owner to make every page look exactly as desired.

Simple and reusable content snippets
You can define ‘snippets’: small pieces of content used across several pages, like page headers or footers, or contact info, etc. This means less cut-and-paste text in your pages. This will reduce your modification time when you need to add, remove or change the text in it.

Other

• Password protected administration.
• Simple user and permission management.
• File manager (plugin) allows you to upload, browse and edit files.

• Posted: November 10, 2008
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