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Welcome to Alive CMS!

Alive CMS is an open source Content Management System for the Django web application framework and I wrote it because I needed one and I wanted to experiment with the concepts you find in it. I wanted a simple yet powerful tool to make and maintain web sites. Alive CMS is simple: adding or editing content doesn't require knowledge of HTML only the use of web forms and a web based word processor. Alive CMS is powerful: it is also a framework that allows programmers to create new content types, the look & feel is highly customizable by someone with web design skills. Templates and styles are bundled as “skins” and once a skin is created, changing to it is very easy.

The main concepts themselves are not new, I merely interpreted them the way I like. Some core concepts (more details in the concepts section):

  1. I look at web resources as objects, not so new since Zope is some 10 years old and has a similar concept
  2. Role based access control, again not so new, it is similar to Unix groups and Zope's roles machinery
  3. A relatively high level of decoupling between objects holding data and the persistent storage of that data, i.e. you can have different storage backends, not necessarily a relational database. A certain level of storage independence is very common, every decent web framework allows you to choose a database
  4. A relatively high level of decoupling between business logic and presentation. Creating a new skin requires HTML/CSS skills and following a pattern. Changing a skin is merely selecting the one to use. Yet again easy skinning is not very new, think WordPress customization

In it's current incarnation Alive CMS is not very complete and a work in progress. That means that I probably will change how things work, it also means that there is no regression test suite. Very likely I will add new content types over time.

You might think: Can I use it? Well you can and obviously I use it, this site is running on it. But you might find that it currently has some rough edges and if you look for guaranted smooth sailing you are currently probably better of looking elswhere. If you like exploring the new, this might be just for you.

Does it sounds interesting? Download Alive CMS, install Django and Alive CMS (it's a Django project, so it's just unpacking the archive in a suitable place, like your home directory) and try it out. There's always the chance you like to play with it!

Paulus