Frog CMS

Infobox Software
name = Frog CMS

developer = [http://www.philworks.com Philippe Archambault]
latest_release_version = 0.9.4
latest_release_date = release date|2008|09|29
operating_system = Cross-platform
genre = CMS/Blog software
license = AGPL v.3
website = [http://www.madebyfrog.com Frog CMS]

Frog CMS is an open source content management system originally developed by Philippe Archambault. The design decision taken from its start was to use PHP5 as the language for the software, along with a MySQL database backend, although it also has support for SQLite (version 3). It is a port of the Ruby on Rails CMS known as Radiant, although Frog has begun to take its own development direction.

History

Attracted to the Radiant CMS system, Archambault set about to write a PHP equivalent. The first name given to the project was "phpRadiant", [ cite web|url=http://cmsreport.com/node/573|title=phpRadiant to imitate Radiant CMS|accessdate=2008-04-28|date=2007-01-04 ] although by February 2007 it was renamed "Frog" after consultation with the PHP team. [ cite web|url=http://www.madebyfrog.com/blog/phpradiant-change-is-name-to-frog-cms.html|title=phpRadiant change is name to Frog CMS|accessdate=2008-04-28|date=2007-01-29 ]

Work began in December 2006, and a first functioning public beta was released in January 2007. [ cite web|url=http://www.blogsweek.com/en/interview-with-philippe-archambault|title=Interview with Philippe Archambault|accessdate=2008-04-28|date=2007-09-11 ] During 2008, Archambault expanded the development team. [ cite web|url=http://www.madebyfrog.com/blog/2008/08/11/im-not-alone-anymore-.html|title=I'm not alone anymore !!|accessdate=2008-09-22|date=2008-08-11 ] The 0.9.3 release marked a licensing change, from the MIT license of previous versions, to the current Affero GPL license. The target of a version 1.0 release by January 2008 was not met, but development continues with a stable 0.9.4 release (September 2008).

Features

Frog CMS offers the common advantages being based on the well-known PHP/mySQL pairing, and resisting the temptation to develop its own arcane scripting system. It does, however, make use of an "Extra Light PHP Framework" to provide some commonly used functions to the CMS. Otherwise, its main features include:

* simple hierarchical structured page creation and navigation
* drag-and-drop page re-ordering
* styles and metadata assigned globally or on a per-page basis
* flexible page content with reusable "snippets" (header, footer), or sidebar, or extended (custom fields) content
* lightweight core with many functions available as "plugins", including file-management, comment forms, Textile and Markdown support, and database connectivity via [http://php.net/pdo PDO] (required for use with SQLite); user-contributed plugins include the TinyMCE and FCKeditor wysiwyg editors, gallery, and lightbox-style image display
* user management, allowing three levels of access ("Administrator" = full site access; "Developer" = complete access except to the "User" module; "Editor" = access only to unprotected pages) to the backend; pages can be selectively "protected" from those with "Editor" rights
* built-in CSS editing
* UTF8 encoding, with i18n modules currently available for Bengali (Bangla), Chinese, Czech, Dutch, French, German, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Russian, and Spanish

References

External links

* [http://www.madebyfrog.com Official website]
* [http://code.google.com/p/madebyfrogs/ Source-code repository]
* [http://forum.madebyfrog.com/ User community forum]