This content originally appeared on Level Up Coding - Medium and was authored by The Tech Maker
This is a real alternative to popular content management systems
A few years ago I was looking for a lightweight Content Management System for smaller websites.
My first experience was: all these popular CMS are very complex and you need a lot of time to understand them before you can create a simple, say 10–20 page website.
Since I’m self-employed, the effort to learn how it works isn’t paid for by any of my clients. So for every CMS I’ve tried, it’s taken me over an hour to install it and get a simple “Hello World” site up and running.
A second criterion was the usability of the backend. Many people who write content for websites, the actual users, don’t know much about how to use computers and applications. So I tested how easy it’s to create a new page and then fill it with content.
What I Learned Testing CMSs
For the common known CMS one hour installation wasn’t enough and the backend was often very complex and overloaded with functions you never need.
The simple, rather unknown systems had fewer or no features and sometimes a horrible backend that I couldn’t put in my customers’ hands.
WebsiteBaker
My first install took around 30 minutes, including the “Hello World” page. Pretty cool!
There are a few design templates pre-installed, my favorite is the “Blank Template”. As an experienced web developer, I love coding designs from scratch rather than “reverse engineering” a ready-made template.
WebsiteBaker already has some modules installed for typical page types like blog/news, forms and perhaps the most important module WYSIWYG. This is the text editor with many formatting tools, similar to Microsoft Word.
The Page Admin
First I’ll explain the page admin, the heart of the CMS.
On the left side there’s a page tree, if you look at “EN” you’ll see that it’s expanded “DE”, “NL”, “FR” are collapsed. Below “EN” there are the subpages “Content”, “Contact”, “Images” and so on. This represents the whole website like a sitemap and is easy to understand even for inexperienced users.
In the middle is the page title. This is automatically used for the title in the navigation menu of the page, but you can change it. So the page title in the CMS backend can be different from the menu title on the front page.
On the right you will find a lot of icons
- pencil: edit page parameters
- calendar: schedule a page to be online within a certain date and time
- arrow up/down: shift a page within the tree
- bin: delete a page (with undo)
- file icon with plus sign: add a sub page
- info about the language of the page
The Add Page Section
To add a page, you must enter a title and select a page type. You can select a parent page here and set the visibility.
- “Public” means that everyone can see the page on the front page in the navigation menu.
- A page can be “hidden” so it doesn’t appear in the navigation menu, but you can see it if you know the URL. For example, this is a great option for a download page that’s only accessible to certain users you’ve given the link to.
- For registered users the visibility can be set to “Registered”. Yes, this small CMS supports front-end login for registered users!
Some Words to Language Selection
As you can see, several languages are organized as top pages. This may be a bit confusing at first, but it makes sense. If you look at the sitemap of a website, the languages are at the top of the page tree.
Page Types
See an example of the WYSIWYG Editor (“What You See Is What You Get”):
WebsiteBaker uses the CKEditor for text pages. This is a very cool editor with many configuration options and offers the possibility to use custom CSS for the editor.
In this screenshot you can see the font, colors and even the width of the editor I set to the front page design, — this is real WYSIWYG.
In the toolbox, CKEditor offers many more tools, but I configure them to show only the ones really necessary. This makes editing much clearer and easier for my customers.
Other page types are:
- blog/news module
- a form module mostly used for contact forms which send an email when submitted
- wrapper module for embedding any page or website in an iframe
- one of my favourites the code module. It allows you to insert individual PHP code for some very special pages. I used it once to access the PayPal API.
Many more modules can be found on the internet. Programming your own modules isn’t very complicated. WebsiteBaker offers a developer module, with which you can easily find out how modules work.
Users and Groups
You can create groups with special access rights and add users to the groups.
As mentioned earlier, you can set up registration and login features for front end users. However, this group/user model isn’t only used for the front page, but can also be used in the WebsiteBaker backend.
Access can be granted or denied for almost any action or module in the CMS. I usually only give editor users access to the WYSIWYG editor.
Another good example is the code editor. If I write a complex PHP code for a very specific purpose, only I (=admin) may access the code module.
Conclusion
This CMS has page modules for common used page types, multi language and groups/user access functionality, and an easy to use backend.
If, like me, you’re looking for a feature-rich CMS that can be configured quickly without spending hours or days trying to understand the basic functionality, WebsiteBaker might be a good choice for you too.
This is just a short introduction to the WebsiteBaker CMS. If you want to read more about it now, feel free to contact me and I’ll write more detailed WebsiteBaker stories.
Here is the official web site: https://websitebaker.org
Why You Should Try WebsiteBaker If You Need an Easy to Use, Great CMS was originally published in Level Up Coding on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
This content originally appeared on Level Up Coding - Medium and was authored by The Tech Maker
The Tech Maker | Sciencx (2021-09-26T17:23:10+00:00) Why You Should Try WebsiteBaker If You Need an Easy to Use, Great CMS. Retrieved from https://www.scien.cx/2021/09/26/why-you-should-try-websitebaker-if-you-need-an-easy-to-use-great-cms/
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