December 14, 2024
By Web Designers for Web Designers
Tools

10 Simple and Light Weight CMS Solutions

92 Comments011.6k

Choosing the right content management system can be an overwhelming task for a web designer or developer. There are so many available, all with different features, it can be difficult to decide which is the best solution for a particular web project. For complex websites, a fully featured CMS is probably the best way to go. However, for simple sites, lots of bells and whistles can be overkill and actually be a bit confusing for the person maintaining the website.

In this article, I’ve rounded up 10 simple and light weight cms solutions. All of these systems were built with simplicity and ease-of-use in mind.

Wolf CMS

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Wolf CMS simplifies content management by offering an elegant user interface, flexible templating per page, simple user management and permissions, as well as the tools necessary for file management. Wolf CMS is a fork of Frog CMS. Although the two applications still share a family resemblance, Wolf has left Frog’s development path.

Get Simple

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GetSimple is an XML based lite Content Management System. To go along with it’s intuitive user interface, it’s loaded with features that every website needs, but with nothing it doesn’t.

Perch

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Perch is a really little content management system for when you (or your clients) need to edit content without the hassle of setting up a big CMS.

sNews

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sNews is a completely free, standards compliant, PHP and MySQL driven Content Management System. It is extremely lightweight, simple and customizable. This cms consists of only one core engine file, one independent template file and its accompanying CSS stylesheet file, plus an .htaccess file that makes all URLs search engine friendly.

Zimplet CMS

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Zimplit is extremely lightweight, simple and customizable. It’s easy to install, and easy to use via a simple web interface. Zimplit consists of only one core engine file.

PageLime

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PageLime is a simple CMS for web designers. It acts as a remote Content Management System that allows you to update the content, images, and documents on your web site without any setup. All you have to do is add the ‘cms-editable’ CSS class to any element on your site, and we host the application that edits your site.

Surreal CMS

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With Surreal CMS, there’s absolutely nothing to install. Just enter your website’s FTP info and you’re connected! Within minutes, you can enable webpages, add content regions, assign editors, and begin updating your website — and you don’t even need an FTP client to get started.

CMS Made Simple

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CMS Made Simple provides a fast and easy way to create a web site and manage its contents. Use it to make a home page for your family — or your multinational corporation!

Simple CMS

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A fully branded, easy to use content management system for your clients. All you do is add a little piece of code to your existing site.

CushyCMS

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CushyCMS is a Content Management Systems (CMS) that is truly simple. It’s free for unlimited users, unlimited changes, unlimited pages and unlimited sites.

It’s built from the ground up with ease of use in mind – for both content editors and designers. It’s such a simple CMS that it takes less than 3 minutes for a web designer to implement. No PHP or ASP required for this CMS. If you can add CSS classes to HTML tags then you can implement CushyCMS. It’s also a hosted CMS, so no installation or maintenance is needed either.

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Henry Jones is a web developer, designer, and entrepreneur with over 14 years of experience. He is the founder of WDL and ThemeTrust.

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91 Comments

  5. Andy Reply

    Wolf CMS is an extremely adaptable CMS especially if you know PHP. Its not bloated with functionality like other well know projects enabling you to adapt and extend easily.

  6. Nils Reply

    My current favorite is Symphony CMS https://symphony-cms.com/

    It’s very lightweight and lets you decide what type of content you want and how you want to display it: Create a section with a text-input, textarea and tags for a blog or add a file upload-field to them to create a portfolio. The possibilities are endless!

    Another huge plus is its use of XSLT as the template language. XSLT is simply a lot more powerful than any other template language I’ve come across. And it comes with your typical PHP installation.

    1. David Reply

      @midday – the current development version of Wolf CMS (top of this list!) now has a core “multiple languages” plugin which will give out-of-the-box capabilities. It’s fairly simple at the moment, but quite effective.

      Hope that helps!

  12. Steven Reply

    I’m a big fan of CMS Made Simple personally. I’ve used it for http://www.elevation-events.com and http://www.elekt.net (the latter of which will gain more content as soon as the event’s taken place), and it’s been an absolute dream to work with. From XHTML + CSS to fully functioning took me about a day a website (including detailed lists of children-pages, manageable gallery’s, easy youtube-embedding and so on). Version 2.0 should be even more awesome :).

  18. Brian Reply

    I’ve used sNews & GetSimple, and for what they do I find them excellent bits of code. Wolf looks interesting as well. I’m not a big fan of CMS systems hosted elsewhere, like Cushy et. al.

  19. Batfan Reply

    I really like the idea of editable div’s with PageLime and CushyCMS but, I’d rather have the login/editor as a script that I could put on my site. Rather than having them go to another site.

  21. Conor Darcy Reply

    I’ve used Cushy & Perch recently. With Cushy you give them your FTP info & they update the html there & then. I used it once & never went back as its subscription based & has trouble working out a pricing model for my clients. Could get messy in the future. Perch i do like. Simple to install & customise at a very affordable price. Support is superb & just suggest a new feature & you’ll probably see it in the next update.

  23. Jason Gross Reply

    Great List, some real solid solutions for clients who are not tech savvy. It is easy to underestimate how much happier clients will be if they can update their own content without confusion.

  30. Entertica Reply

    I am looking for bilingual or multi languages small CMS.

    Currently I use WordPress with 2 pages as language selector (say it in slug: EN & ES). This solution works very well. But my clients said it was too complex.

    Your advise please 😀
    Thanks

  31. Michel Leconte Reply

    Entertica,

    you should try https://www.seotoaster.com . It is simple enough with inline editing to make the list, and it comes in 4 languages including French, Spanish, and Portuguese at time of this writing.

    I’m surprised it did not make the list. On top of being simple to use, it’s also very easy to build website with, and it is the most advanced SEO CMS out of the box.

    Finally it scales with the ability to remotely pilot SEO and web marketing for any number of websites from a central location through SEO Samba.

    Ah yes, it’s free and open source too.

  32. Darren Reply

    How could you not include Concrete5? I think that is one of the best up and comers — for ease of use, ease of integration and sheer power. The community is strong and growing, too. It is one of the most powerful and extensible CMS’s I’ve found, yet with the user-friendliness my clients desperately need!

    https://www.concrete5.org/
    (I do not work for them, I’m just a devoted advocate — besides, it is open source!!)

  36. Chocksy Reply

    I like ChushyCms idea of using classes for editing certain sections of the page. This is one of the best ideas i saw in all of these CMSes. I usually opt for simple stuff since this gives you room for improvements without messing around too much with code. But WordPress is pretty good when it comes to CMS but i wish it would move from the Blog part as i saw this is what they intend to do.

    ~Razvan

  37. Benedetto Reply

    Actually, i started to use SkyBlueCanvas. This is my first CMS, because i didnt like them, because it’s not easy to design (for me). But i like it. It’s simple, easy to design, and open-source.

  38. Martijn Reply

    Hi!

    As the lead developer for Wolf CMS, I just wanted to add that we now support creating translations of page content.

    It will be in the next release (0.7.0) or you can get a nightly build.

    Cheers, Martijn

    1. Derrick Reply

      These type cms systems really can’t compete with Joomla in regard to full scale. Joomla has pretty much closed the door on full scale cms and it basically the “cms iPhone”.

      The quest now is for a simple cms to edit some text and an image in a static site. something that requires virtually no training for the client or a few minutes at most.

  46. Bruce Reply

    As an old graphic designer with no web experience I have just used webyep and its integration with Freeway Pro. Worked fine for a small cafe site.
    These sorts of simplified tools are the future for small websites.

  47. bob dobbs. Reply

    Sorry to rain on the lovefeast, but I reckon that most cms’s are very limiting.

    The main thing I find frustrating is that all force you to use xhtml.

    Why can’t I use any doctype I want to? And why should I use xhtml over html, when a huge section of browsers in use can’t accept the correct MIME type for xhtml ?

    A sufficiently well designed cms lets a designer use the doctype that he wants to. Any alternative to this means unneccessary work for the cms creator in the future, and more work for anybody using the cms.

    I ask CMS creators to think about their choices in this regard. Why use xhtml when it confers no advantage over html in the vast majority of use cases? Why use it when IE still can’t accept the right MIME type to support it?

    1. Drew McLellan Reply

      (I’m the lead developer of one of the CMSs mentioned here, Perch)

      That’s the approach we took in designing our CMS. It doesn’t care if you want to publish HTML4, XHTML, HTML5, JSON, XML, CSV or even CSS.

      The template system will deal with any text-based format.

      We do have the option of using the HTML-generating formatting languages Textile and Markdown, but have added our own post-processing to those to enable the admin to configure XHTML or HTML-style tags.

      You’re right – choice is important. The tool should work for the site, not the other way around.

        1. Drew McLellan Reply

          In the context of a commercial web design project, that’s around the typical hourly rate.

          If the most important aspect of a CMS for you is its cost, then there are lots of free options.

          Most people find that as long as the cost is fair, there are more important factors to consider than the price, not least of which being the value they put on their time.

    2. kneekoo Reply

      @bob dobbs: Changing standards is first important for developers. XHTML brought some god stuff on the table because it simply tried to improve the web document consistency and promote healthy web development.

      Here’s a very nice comparison of HTML and XHTML:
      https://htmlfixit.com/tutes/tutorial_XHTML_and_HTML_-_The_differences.shtml

      But in the end, I must disagree with you and the Internet Explorer suggestion. Microsoft is not stagnant. Even if they tend to be behind others, we don’t have to force web development to fit one company’s shoes because the final benefiters are the users and clean, healthy code, is one thing that will finally help them to virtually use any browser to manage their internet activities. Someday Microsoft will also play by the rules because they are forced to do so.

  48. Derrick Reply

    I’ve looked over all of the CMSs mentioned here. I’ve used almost every type of CMS config and thought a little review might help:

    My reviews:

    Top Free:
    Pulse CMS (shocking that it’s free!)

    Top subscription based:
    Surreal CMS (fast support too)
    Cushy

    Top One-Off Fee based:
    Unify (@ $16/domain. Very fair price. Should never be over $20/domain.)

    I’ve actually subscribed to Simple CMS. I know it new but VERY buggy. Their code often conflicts with my scrips. Great guys that run it, just super buggy. I’ve had to deal with a lot of client complaints.

    Hope this helps.

  50. Yvan Reply

    Hey, everybody ! I’ve got a question for you.

    There are a lot of these simple CMS (a bit too many maybe ?), but I’m not sure they can achieve what I need :

    I need to create a little web-site easily manageable (that’s why I’m here) that can handle a little community of member with each of them being able to manage their own page (or maybe a set of pages) in the limit of a given template.

    Would that be possible with CMS Made Simple, for instance ?

    Thanks a lot

  57. Adrian Borkala Reply

    GingerPenguin is fairly new to the CMS world so worth giving us a try. Currently has a similar approach to content management as CushyCMS however we are planning some awesome features in terms of content management and analytics working together.

  59. craig Reply

    you forgot concrete5, it truly is an awesome system. Any one can use it. click, edit and save. thats it! So easy for developers, it’s still in it’s infancy but I’m really very impressed.

  60. Yorick Reply

    Nice selection !
    What about a No code, No techno language, No Installation, … the CMS for dummies, the “think about the nature and the organization of content” way to build a website ? Simplicity would be even more respected , and most users along ?
    Or do we need a bit of coding thrill ?

    A ridiculously easy CMS – for dummies – straight to the content one
    is for example http://www.simple-different.com
    even easier than Webs, Weebly and Wix …

    As a web designer, or website facilitator, finally when it is about resulting with one’s content nicely, clearly organized for a client and more especially for his reader. A reader who does not care about what is behind the page… most of the time… we don’t even need to use our techno wizardry.

    Simplicity is a vast interesting subject isn’t it ?

  67. Razibul Hassan Reply

    Thanks for the Brilliant post. I’d been looking for some pretty simple CMSs and your list has make the perfect listing of some easy yet rich UI CMSs.

  69. Adrian Borkala Reply

    A really simple CMS to use is our very own GingerPenguin. No coding required at all in order to start editing pages as the CMS integrates with pretty much most sites, and allows you to click on your content to mark a section as editable.

    Designers can also customise a home page which is basically an iframe on the welcome page where you can display a webpage with whatever content you like eg: News to your clients, or a support form, or whatever you like really.

    GingerPenguin is a SaaS product so if your looking for self hosted, someone recently introduced us to PulseCMS which also looks pretty smart and simple to use.

  70. David Williams Reply

    One I have come across and looks promising is Jonnash CMS at https://www.jonnash-cms.co.uk. It allows the website owner to create unlimited categories/web pages for his web site. Still in its infancy, but like the idea of no limits of pages I can have. Testing it now on on my home server.

  71. Ann McSorley Reply

    Great list, I would also like to add https://www.veolay.com to this list.

    We have veolay installed to more that 20 websites and all our clients are really happy how easy it works for them and it takes us only a couple of minutes to convert our html website into an online manageable website where our client can login and make their content changes within a couple of clicks on the webpage itself.

  72. David B Reply

    There is something newer-iMagic CMS https://imagiccms.com/ to me I was possible to try have found the CMS precisely. Very easy CMS, it is possible to make to itself a site for an evening. Developers tell that them CMS 100 % SEO 🙂

  81. Artscape Reply

    Get-Simple is one of my favourite content management systems. I have build a lot of websites using Get-Simple, it’s perfect for designer who doesn’t code in PHP and has to build a small complete web site from time to time.

  82. krrahman Reply

    Now a days CMS has added lot of easy web feature which were almost impossible in the near past. CMS gives users full right to choice what they want add their website. Nice Looking, Interactive function and so more. Thanks Henry Jones for sharing very impressive 10 cms tolls with little description.

  84. Hemang Rindani Reply

    Nice introduction to various upcoming Content management systems (CMS). True that the market is flooded with number of CMS development companies, all coming up with variety content management solutions. Alternatively there are certain enterprise web content management solutions that provides sophisticated and methodical approach to construct and manage powerful websites effortlessly. It is important to understand about what the business is all about and how it is expected to expand. Selected CMS must necessarily align to the user requirements and provide flexible, responsive and secured platform. Apart from the giants like Sitefinity CMS, WordPress, Drupal, Joomla etc. I feel that certain CMSs like Perch, October, Surreal and cameleon CMS are other good alternatives. From the article I would like to highlight the capabilities of Perch. It is a fast, easy and reliable web content management system that has ability to build powerful websites or can act as CMS for applications made on Bootstrap, Foundation or other front-end frameworks, JavaScript plugins and methods. With WordPress, migrating current system asks for painful efforts, however Perch works differently and themes are alien for it. Perch CMS allows templates to be built using HTML, CSS and JS as if in a static site. Editable regions can be replaced with PHP tags. Perch run-time allows to migrate the content easily to the new framework. It is based on file system and thus Perch is a perfect match for small to medium projects.
    Surreal is also a good one page parallax based framework to help the organizations in developing small scale websites with consistent look.

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