Wolf CMS: A fork of Frog CMS

I’ve written about my Frog CMS usage in previous blog posts; where other CMS’s can be a little overkill for small websites, Frog CMS fits perfectly into the gap. Unfortunately as much as I like Frog, the development seems to have stopped. The last stable version was released on the 26th April 2009, over a year ago. There’s no need to panic though, a development fork has been created called Wolf CMS which is building upon this superb little CMS and making it even better!

At the moment there’s very little difference between Frog and Wolf as you might expect, so migrating from one to the other is fairly simple, a wiki page has been created with instructions on how to do this. As it says on the page it’s probably best to decide between the two versions now since there’s still little difference between them, but this could change in future versions (version 0.6.0 introduced a number of large changes). So there may be a point where it isn’t (easily) possible to jump between the two versions.

So what are the differences at the moment? When version 0.6.0 of Wolf CMS was released on the 1st February it added a new core plug-in called ‘BackupRestore’, allowing admin users to easily backup the Wolf CMS core DB tables. I’ve been using an external plug-in to do this on sites I built, so having this feature added as a core plug-in is nifty addition. Other features include:

• Admin users can now uninstall plug-ins, including the db tables
• HTTPS Support added to the admin area for greater security
• You can now preview a page before it is published

It’s great to see that such a useful little CMS hasn’t been left to stagnate and die out, the roadmap for Wolf CMS looks promising, so fingers crossed it has a bright future ahead of it. I think it’s time to migrate my Frog websites over to Wolf…