Frog CMS – Nice and simple CMS

You often find that most small websites that require a CMS don’t require all the features that some of larger solutions offer. While the likes of MODx, Expression Engine and even WordPress are amazing platforms to work from, they can be a little overkill for very small sites. (WordPress isn’t strictly a CMS, but it can be hacked to perform similar actions).

I decided to look for a simple solution; that’s when FrogCMS popped up. It’s free, open-source and very simple to setup. Upload to your server, create your MySQL database with relevant privileges, run the install script and there you go. A big plus point with Frog is the administration page is very straight forward to use, so even the most technophobic client shouldn’t have a problem editing their pages.

Admin shot of Frog CMS
Clean and simple administration area.

The templating system is a breeze to use if you know a bit of basic PHP. For example say you want to add a main navigation that automatically updates as you add pages:

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<ul id="mainNav">
    <li id="first"><a<?php echo url_match('/') ? ' class="active"': ''; ?> href="<?php echo URL_PUBLIC; ?>">Home</a></li>
    <?php foreach($this->find('/')->children() as $menu): ?>
            <li><?php echo $menu->link($menu->title, (in_array($menu->slug, explode('/', $this->url)) ? ' class="active"': null)); ?></li>
    <?php endforeach; ?>
</ul>

The ‘foreach’ just loops through the children off the main site route and generates the navigation as an unordered list. Defining editable areas in a layout is just as simple:

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//Add a snippet
<?php $this->includeSnippet('top-navigation'); ?>

//Add your main page content
<?php echo $this->content(); ?>

//Add another area of content called 'sidebar'; Controlled via a tab on the page admin.
<?php echo $this->content('sidebar'); ?>

//Test to see if we have content, then show
<?php if ($this->hasContent('sidebar')) echo $this->content('sidebar'); ?>

Even with just those simple lines of code it is possible to create a dynamic user managed website. If it doesn’t do exactly what you want you could always write a [You often find that most small websites that require a CMS don’t require all the features that some of larger solutions offer. While the likes of MODx, Expression Engine and even WordPress are amazing platforms to work from, they can be a little overkill for very small sites. (WordPress isn’t strictly a CMS, but it can be hacked to perform similar actions).

The only negative point I have to say is that it doesn’t seem to get updated very often, but for most projects that shouldn’t be a problem as it’s already has a solid code base with lots of support and docs available.

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