CMS without database - review of some good choices

Some may regard it as archaic: A Content management system (CMS) without database. data is stored in text files on the server instead. Many web site owners perhaps will even doubt that this could work.

Nevertheless: In some situations it really makes sense to use a system without a database like mysql. Some good systems like Pivot, SkyBlueCanvas, RazorCMS or Pluck are available.

But before going in detail an answer to the questions: why real doing this? Most things run beautifully and well under Wordpress anyway - so what for?

There are different possible reasons now:

Installation effort: Every database needs to be established. You may hardly notice this if you make a single web site. You see the difference doing 10 or more web pages.

Data security: Web site and database must always be saved. If you forget one of both nothing may run anymore. Securing a Mysql database is usually much more difficult and time consuming than to FTP server content

Speed: Highly visitied servers suffer from dramatic speed losses if too many database queries are carried out. So if there is a smaller project on this server it may slow down dramatically.

Simplicity: Why a Mercedes, if one only wants to fetch cigarettes? That is for small projects most cms are simply "too big"

Flexibility: to change something at a Wordpress system may be difficult. Simpler Cms can often be adopted faster

Therefore I like to show some "lite" alternatives which I found at http://www.opensourcecms.com/, and after selecting and testing there installed successfully myself and liked:

Pivot (http://www.pivotlog.net/): To make it briefly: Pivot is a mature system that hardly leaves a wish open especially for a Blog. A great Community (at present 75,000 contributions) helps at all problems. Though: With 5.6 MB also no more straight "lite", even if Pivot runs without Mysql database and stores everything as text files

SkyBlueCanvas Lightweight CMS (http://www.skybluecanvas.com/) is already considerably smaller with 2.8 MB. The less known system also shows a little lean "optic". But under the hood there is considerably more than at Pivot: Numerous modules like news, form managers, picture administration and more already make it a mature CMS. The individual modules can be placed on various locations on the site.

Pluck (http://www.pluck-cms.org/) (similarly large as SkyBlueCanvas) comes with the Tinymice editor and offers considerably less modules but a clean and easy operator surface. Simple for a smaller project.

RazorCMS (http://www.razorcms.co.uk/) is far away from a Blog and by far also the smallest program. The Core is merely 200 kb in size. With some additional modules (called Plugins or Blades) and a WYSIWYG editor (you can choose one of 3 available, I used Nicedit being the smallest) with only just over 300 kb.
This is rewarded by a lightning speed in comparison with the colleagues and extremely flexible in many things.
SEO optimized linking is available. So in my opinion in a real secret tip.
Also templating is easy ... Have a look on one of my first sites: http://www.freebiesroom.com/ - the template was converted in about 2 hours to this system (being not a professional designer I have to admit)

Enjoy!

 

Very nice writeup. I have tried razorcms and liked it. I will certainly give the others a whirl!

There's also nanocms - http://nanocms.in/

 

I liked 19pages, it was great for rapid microsites development. Unfortunately it is no longer available on 19pages website, but maybe you can try to find somwhere else (it was free).

 

19 pages is cool, I also got a mod from the author that allows you to add more than 19 pages (it's just a simple change in code).

 

Care to share the mod ^^ ?

 

Hi sensitiv,
I'm looking for an easy, user-friendly and speedy CMS for my HTML-based site.
It has about 100 static pages and more than 600 visitors daily. Right now I'm working on SEO for this site and I hope the visitors number will grow. And I'm also planning to increase articles number.

I want to transfer the site to a CMS but don't know to which.

My pages contain articles with one ore more pictures.
And I need to categorize them into different categories. I also need some basic plugins: voting, download counting, may be tag cloud, search, recent articles, comments and etc.
I'd love to use non-MySQL-based CMS. But don't know which exactly.

Can you recommend a CMS, knowing the above details of my site and my requirements?

 

Hello, allow me to introduce my CMS

Template CMS - a fast and a little content management system written in PHP, which allows you to easily create a website business card, satellite, home page of a man who has no expertise in php or html. If you are into PHP, HTML, CSS you can quickly and easily create theme and add-ons for Template CMS.

Features
- Easy to install, use and update
- Easy administration interface.
- Multilingual interface administration. (English, Russian +)
- Minimum requirements for web hosting (without sqlDB only PHP)
- Keywords and description for each page and for all.
- Easy page editor (WYSIWYG).
- Create a backup of the site.
- Ability to change themes.
- Ability to specify custom template for any page.
- Ease of development and integration of new themes.
- Editing themes directly from admin
- Modules comment system, news/blog
- File Manager
- Friendly URLs (also with extension .html .php .asp etc..).

Site [en]: http://templatecms.webdevart.ru/en/
Site ru: http://templatecms.webdevart.ru/

 

Also this cms gulp!:

 

hello i have found a very simple cms (no need for a database);
you only need a little html and css knowledge to set up your template;
writing content to the page is very very simple:

http://cms.libe.net ( i am new, so i could not make livelinks)

 

I just wanna to add information
textpress.googlecode.com

texTPress is a web application to publish the information through the website which is created by php using text files as data storage. texTPress is built without the need for setting the database. Once you finish putting the files to the server, this application can be executed directly.

texTPress has the ability to automatic blogging and blogging manual. You can also change templates with ease and without a complicated setup to start running. Including SEO settings are automatically set