Jus5 - Light Weight CMS

As promised in my previous post about the release of Nexty, I want to announce my new project - Jus5. It is not exactly ‘new’ - I have been working on it for a couple of weeks. Jus5 is a light weight CMS. It is also a total failure

Download Jus5 (Updated)

See Jus5 In Action

What is Jus5?

Jus5 is perhaps the smallest Content Management System. The system only requires 9 files(less than 100KB) - without the editor. The entire system can be compressed into just 2 files - but my conscience is not letting me do that.

Features

Jus5 is a Lightweight CMS that can be used to create and manage smaller sites. It includes only the most essential features of a CMS tool.

• Customizable Themes
• Add/Edit/Delete Pages
• Add/Edit/Delete Categories
• mod_rewrite support(User Friendly URLs)
• Client/Admin Model
• Single Admin
• WYSIWYG Editor Support(TinyMCE)
• Easy to Install/Use
• And More…

Purpose

The purpose of this software is to let people set up micro sites with the least amount of troubles. My aim is this - the web master copies the files over to the server and calls up the location in the browser and the system is in place. No configuration - no editing config files - no going through wizards to set up this software(ideally).

A good example for this is sourceforge sites - ie. the web hosting support that sourceforge site provides for open source projects. I have some OSS projects in sourceforge - and each of them have a site - nexty and bdir. The problems with this is, the site is too limited to use a professional CMS tool like Drupal or Mambo. The only other options is to manage it manually. This is what I have been doing so far - and it is getting a bit tedious.

Enter Jus5 - just upload the necessary files to the server - and you have the system running!

At least that was the plan.

Problems

If you have been in the Web development field for some time, you will immediately spot the problem when I said that I want the program to have zero configuration. You will know that at the very least, the user have to provide the database connection details.

But there is one method that can be used to overcome this limitation - SQLite. I used this method to create the entire application. The problem is not all servers have SQLite support in PHP. SourceForge don’t!

As a result, I have added MySQL driver support to this system - but now the user must configure the system before running it. Not what I wanted.

With that change I am releasing a ‘working’ version of Jus5. Please remember that this is a beta release - expect broken stuff. Don’t use it in a production system.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 7th, 2007 at 1:19 pm and is filed under PHP, Scripts, Web Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.