I chose some of the most known one next to WordPress to the most obscure ones. Varying form flat files to full mySQL database. Ones that require almost no knowledge to get up and running, although most CMS now a days are becoming more and more easily to install(not Movable Type).

Should it happen you are in a spot where you are not able to use WordPress, check out these 10 CMS that differ greatly from each other.

Zimplit

Zimplit is the easiest CMS (Content Management System) ever made.
Zimplit is extremely lightweight, simple and customizable. It’s easy to install, and easy to use via a simple web interface. Zimplit consists of only one core engine file

* Price: Free
* Server Language: PHP v-4.x
* Database: No
* Self-Hosted: Yes
* Plug-ins: No. But themes are available.

SkyBlueCanvas

SkyBlueCanvas Lightweight CMS is an open source, free content management system written in php and built specifically for small web sites.

Lightweight and simple does not mean simplistic, however. SkyBlueCanvas includes a lot of the same basic abilities as more robust systems but in a simpler form. The software is not meant to be all things to all users but it does offer features you expect like a familiar Plugin API, Extensibility and skinnability.

* Price: Free
* Server Language: PHP v4-5.x – Only Linux Servers
* Database: No
* Self-Hosted: No
* Plug-ins: Yes

razorCMS

razorCMS, the flat file content management system, that can be as small or large as you wish. It’s structure allows you to have just the amount of functionality you need in a flat file CMS solution, helping to keep speed and simplicity at a maximum. razorCMS is ideally suited to small to medium website projects, it can be run without need for a SQL database, due to it’s flat file structure it has no need for a database meaning it can also be a cost effected method in content management, allowing it to be used on the cheapest of web hosts, or even free hosting.

* Price: Free
* Server Language: PHP v-5.x
* Database: No
* Self-Hosted: No
* Plug-ins: Yes

LotusCMS

LotusCMS brings to the forefront design and design integration into one of the most neglected CMS niches – Databaseless Web-Design and Development.

* Price: Free
* Server Language: PHP v-5.x
* Database: No
* Self-Hosted: No
* Plug-ins: No.

TypePad

TypePad blogs make it simple for you to share your interests and get noticed.
Easily design and customize your own blog, and use our SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and SMO (Social Media Optimization) tools to promote your blog and attract an audience and following.

* Price: Paid + Free Trial
* Database: Yes
* Self-Hosted: Yes
* Plug-ins: Widgets and Themes

Movable Type

It’s easier than ever to publish and share information with Movable Type. Movable Type makes it simple to manage entire websites, start new blogs, and build an engaged community of readers and customers.

* Price: Free + Paid
* Server Language: Perl
* Database: Yes
* Self-Hosted: No
* Plug-ins: Yes and Themes

Nucleus CMS

Nucleus CMS is a flexible and easy to install content management system, aka blog software. It helps you to publish a website and lets writers do what they are best at: writing items or articles, without having to worry about formatting and markup.

* Price: Free
* Server Language: PHP 4.0.6 or higher
* Database: Yes
* Self-Hosted: No
* Plug-ins: Yes and Themes

b2ecolution

b2evolution is a powerful blog tool. It includes all the features of traditional blog tools, and extends them with evolved features such as file & photo management, versatile skins, multiple blogs, detailed user permissions… not to mention plug-ins, of course.

* Price: Free
* Server Language: PHP version 4.3.2 or higher.
* Database: Yes
* Self-Hosted: No
* Plug-ins: Yes and Themes

Drupal

Use Drupal to build everything from personal blogs to enterprise applications. Thousands of add-on modules and designs let you build any site you can imagine.

* Price: Free
* Server Language: Recommended: PHP 5.2 for Drupal 5 and 6, PHP 5.3 for Drupal 7 Required: PHP version 4.4.0 or higher.
* Database: Yes
* Self-Hosted: No
* Plug-ins: Yes and Themes

Textpattern

Textpattern is an open source content management system unlike any other; it allows you to easily create, edit and publish content and make it beautiful in a professional, standards-compliant manner.

* Price: Free
* Server Language: PHP 4.4.1+ or 5.0.2+, in mod_php or fastcgi mode.
* Database: Yes
* Self-Hosted: No
* Plug-ins: Yes and Themes

But there are alternatives. And today, I want to show you three of them.

Habari. This, in comparison to WP, is one of the latest blogging systems, and you can tell right off the bat: it feels more modern somehow. Indeed, their FAQ explains just how modern it is:

Habari is being written specifically for modern web hosting environments, and uses modern object-oriented programming techniques. Using these recent but well-established additions to the PHP language allows Habari to make use of PDO, enabling prepared statements for all interactions with the database. This greatly reduces the system’s vulnerability to SQL injection attacks. This is just one of many benefits of modern object-oriented techniques.

LifeType is worth a look especially if you’re tasked to build a blog for a non-techie client to use- its really simple to use, and offers multiple blogs and themes built on Smarty. I haven’t had much experience with LifeType, but its loyal users sing praises about its clean code and lightness.

And finally, Movable Type. Okay, so I’ll always have a soft spot for MT- but you know what? It’s a great system, maybe the only one on this list that can truly go head to head with WordPress in terms of features. It features multiple blogs (something I would love regular WP to have), supports both static and dynamic page generation, and has some of the most beautiful blog themes ever to grace the Internet. Movable Type is powered by Perl and not PHP, so if you’re more comfortable with the former, this is probably a better choice for you.

Do you have any WordPress alternatives to suggest? Let us know.

That said, I installed 2.8 beta 2 on a test blog today, and it rocks. Here are five things I love about it:

New Template Tag: the modified author
If you run a blog with multiple authors who regularly modify posts, you’ll love this. It basically allows you to display the name of the last person who modified a particular post. Useful, too, if your blog has been around for a long time, and you’re updating someone else’s posts from years ago.

Instant Feed Links
It’s no secret that I adore feeds. One very awesome thing 2.8 does is automatically add feed links specific to the page being viewed. It does this for category archives, author archives- whatever your poison. This is great for your readers, who might want to subscribe to only a certain author’s posts on your blog.

Better Widget Management
I mean seriously better. See:

The drag-n-drop is smooth (even on my Safari, where I always had trouble before), and the new design just makes more sense.

Better Javascript Loading
Does anyone not use javascript these days? WordPress 2.8 gives you the delightful ability to add javascript includes at the bottom of your pages. Why is this delightful? Because it ultimately means faster page loading times- always a good thing. You can learn more about the changes here.

Better Theme Installer
This one’s my favorite. Have a look at the screenshot below:

That’s right, you can search through themes according to color, columns, width, etc.- and basically spend hours finding just the perfect theme for your blog.

Have you installed WordPress 2.8? What do you like/hate about it?

Thanks to the awesomeness of technology, however, we have a lot of writing tools- a lot of blogging tools- at our disposal these days. These are tools that make the business of blogging a bit easier, and maybe a little more enjoyable. Here are five of my favorites:

TextExpander (Mac OS X). Most bloggers spend a lot of time copying and pasting- and I used to, until I discovered this gem of an application. It’s basically a text replacement program, giving you customized abbreviations for bits of code and text- even images- that you use often. For Windows, try Lifehacker’s Texter.

Google Docs. Since discovering Google Documents, I use it for almost all my writing- and that includes blog post drafts. Yes, even this one. I was particularly grateful for this when my Macbook died last week, and I had to work on an old PC for a few days- all my documents were accessible, online, on Google Docs.

Twitter. That’s right, I consider Twitter one of my favorite blogging tools, because not only can I use Twitter to blog (with the excellent Twitter Tools WordPress Plugin), I get a lot of ideas for blog posts from the people I follow. I use Twhirl to keep updated.

Nisus Thesaurus (Mac OS X). Sometimes, the right word is on the tip of your tongue- and you need a good thesaurus to remember what it is. This nifty little application is free, and features over 120,000 words. For Windows, try WordWeb Free or the FreeThesaurus Firefox plugin.

MyMind (Mac OS X). As any writer knows, procrastination is one of our worst enemies. It’s like there are so many things to do instead of writing. The next time this happens to you, when you’re staring at a blank page, stumped on what to write, may I suggest you try some mind-mapping? Many times, I’ve found that it’s the only thing that will get my thoughts in order, and the writing just flows after that. I like MyMind, which is free for the Mac- but also check out FreeMind, which is multi-platform (and free as well).

What are your favorite blogging tools? Do you use any of my favorites?

The thing is, because RSS Readers are not web browsers, they strip your content down to- well, to just your content. As a subscriber to your RSS feed, I don’t get to see your fancy background or your jazzy sidebars or your 500-pixel-tall header. In RSS Readers, content is truly king. Here are some tips on formatting your next blog post:

• Headers and sub-headers are your friends. When writing a blog post, I like to think less New Yorker, more Reader’s Digest. By adding headers and sub-headers to the different parts of your post, you break up the monotony- and allow your reader to jump to another section if he/she so chooses.
• Use lists. See what I’m doing here? By formatting these tips as a list, I’m separating them from the rest of the post- so again, you don’t just see paragraphs and paragraphs of text. Because you’re expecting tips, your eyes can go straight to the list, knowing that’s where the meat of the post probably is.
• Write shorter paragraphs. You know not to be afraid of white space- and that goes for the space between paragraphs too. Yes, it’s all about breaking up those loooooong paragraphs that look boring (even though they may not be).
• Watch how you align your images. The safest way is to put your image on one line, with a nice strong break before the following text. If you must do the left or right align thing, you should be using CSS anyway.
• Publish full posts. Okay, so that doesn’t have much to do with formatting- I just had to sneak it in there. Please, please publish full posts in your RSS feeds.

Do you have any tips on formatting posts? What types of posts catch your eye in your RSS reader?

By being ruthless.

A strong word- but yes, I do feel somewhat ruthless when it comes to managing my RSS subscriptions- I have to be, or I’ll spend my entire day reading all that “good stuff”. I’ll admit it was difficult at first, but now I can unsubscribe to a feed without batting an eyelash. Last five posts were boring? Unsubscribe. Stopped publishing full posts? Unsubscribe. Haven’t updated in 6 months? Unsubscribe.

As a web publisher or blogger, how do you keep readers like me, the Ruthless Reader, from unsubscribing from your feed? Here are five ways:

1. Actually publish a feed. No, seriously- these days, it’s almost too easy to assume that your blog is publishing a feed properly. Check your feed publishing settings, and subscribe to your own feed so you see what people are getting. There are many times I’ve tried to subscribe to a feed, only to get a bunch of gibberish in my reader.
2. Update, update, update. You don’t have to post several times a day- you don’t even have to post every day. But please don’t stop posting for more than a month without explanation.
3. Publish full posts. Yes, I know that splogs are horrible, and that they’ve led many bloggers to change over from publishing full posts to publishing summaries or excerpts. The thing is, I don’t really want to have to click through to your website to read a post that interests me. Especially when I’m in a hurry, or have a slow connection. When a blog doesn’t publish full posts, I won’t subscribe to its feed- although I will probably bookmark it.
4. Be original. I’m reading your posts to hear your point of view, which should be uniquely you. Remember that news in the blogosphere travels fast- and many sites will publish the same bit of news, the same photos, at almost the exact same time. It’s fine to post the same stuff, but put an original spin on it.
5. Encourage feedback. Despite what I said in #3, there are lots of times I will click through to a site through its feed- and this is usually when I want to leave a comment. Many times, I’ll bookmark the post as well- or send it by email to friends. Write posts that people will react to.

I’ve just checked, and I’m currently subscribed to 187 feeds- a manageable, though sometimes still overwhelming, number for me. How many feeds are you subscribed to? And what are your favorite tips for managing them?

There are literally thousands of WordPress plugins available for use on your blog or WordPress hosted site. Not all plugins will work with each release of WordPress, and these plugins are usually not endorsed by WordPress because anyone with programming knowledge can create them. With this in mind, let us take a look at the top 10 WordPress plugins for site productivity.

Photo from http://www.wpwp.org/

Wassup

This is a new plugin compatible with WordPress versions 2.2 and above. Installing this plugin will provide you with real-time visitor statistics to help you determine how well your site is doing. There is a customizable sidebar widget for you to show your statistics to your viewers. It aims not to provide daily, weekly, or monthly summary stats as some other analytics plug-ins do, but to show you live actions of your visitors as they on the site, while still providing you with information on keywords, hostname, and other stats like other programs. Use it in conjunction with an anti-spam plugin for an even greater edge, or use it as a standalone.

Keyword Luv

In order for your blog comments to work to your full advantage in terms of search engine ranking gains, the anchor text associated with the link to your website should be keywords you want to rank for, right? We can thank spammers for creating the no-follow fiasco—and the fact is, many blog owners will spam a comment which uses keywords as the name of the person leaving the comment. The Keyword Luv plug-in will help fellow commentators by allowing them to place both their name and keyword anchor text on the link—ensuring a fight against spam while saying thanks for commenting. To use the plug-in effectively, your blog should also have the nofollow code removed in order for this plugin to function correctly. You can try the NoFollow Free plug-in to ensure it works. Download the file, unzip to the /wp-content/plugins directory of your site, and manage your plug-ins from your dashboard. When a user comments on your blog all they need to do is enter their name like this: name@keywordphrase. The result will translate to this: John from ABC123 says “Great site!” Where ABC123 would be the link to his site—the keyword phrase he chose.

Comment Luv

Help out fellow commenters by using this plug-in to fetch the most recent blog post from their blog. It will display at the bottom of their comment, and encourage participation in comment campaigns as it will help earn traffic all around. As with its aforementioned counterpart, CommentLuv works with Do-Follow blogs. This plugin works with WP versions 2.5 or higher, and is compatible up to the current WP version 2.6.2.

Image from:http://lirent.net

All-in-One SEO Pack

Need some extra help making sure your content is search engine friendly? There are several SEO plug-ins available for use with WordPress, but this one is great because it lets you customize the important fields just a bit more to push your optimization efforts a little higher. It allows you to change the meta title to include more keywords while still leaving your post title as you wish, make use of a post excerpt rather than posted on information in the meta description that displays with your link on a search engine result page, generate keywords from your categories, and combats duplicate content with a “no-index” feature. Download and install the plugin on your host, and use the dashboard to activate and use the features. This plugin works with versions 1.5 and higher, with compatibility to 2.6.2.

WP DB Backup

To ensure your site stays up and running in the event of computer meltdown, this plugin automatically backs up the database where your posts and other data are stored for archival and restoration purposes. This plugin works with versions 2.0.3 and higher. Customize your settings and data backup frequencies from within the plugin management dashboard.

WP e-Commerce

Need to sell products within your WordPress hosted site or blog? This simplifies the entire process for admin and consumer, from catalog to shopping cart and payment processing. This plugin requires at least version 2.0.2. Simply download and install the plug-in to the appropriate directory and activate from within the dashboard, where customization also takes place.

ShareThis

Social bookmarking is a major component of web traffic, so why not give your readers motivation to submit your entries to various sites? The likelihood of submissions will increase if the ability is there in front of the user, as opposed to hoping that he or she will take the time to manually do it. This plugin allows users to submit the post via AIM, MySpace, Facebook, and various others. To use ShareThis, start by customizing the look of your widget and register for tracking purposes. This can be used with version 1.5 or higher, but is only compatible up to 2.6.

WordPress Related Posts

Want a way to link other relevant posts to your new ones without having to find them do it manually for each post? The WordPress Related Posts plug-in is what you are looking for. By monitoring the tags you use for each post, the plug-in pulls data from the MySQL database where your posts are stored, and then displays the appropriate list of related posts on your page. To use this plugin, download the file, unzip it to the /wp-content/plugins directory, and then place the following command in your template code: <?php wp_related_posts(); ?> To change the output of the plug-in, click Manage > Option > WordPress Related Posts. This plug-in requires at least WordPress version 2.3, and is compatible up to 2.6.2. Newer versions of WordPress have a separate plugin management area in the upper right of the dashboard.

Podcasting

Simplify the delivery of your podcasts with the Podcasting plug-in. Download and install the plug-in, and begin recording podcasts—making RSS feeds a breeze, with multiple feed support and multiple podcast support. Embed a player in any post to encourage your readers to listen, and edit your episodes with ease. This plug-in works on WordPress versions 2.5 and higher.

Twitter Tools

Twitter is an excellent way to notify followers of new blog posts, but it is easy to forget to post the tweet. This is where Twitter Tools comes to the rescue, fully integrating your blog and twitter account so as to automatically post a tweet to notify followers of a new blog post as soon as it publishes. This plugin may be used with WordPress 2.3 or higher.

This list represents only a small portion of the total amount of WordPress plugins out there available for your use. With this list, we have covered social networking, analytics, podcasting, SEO, site backup, e-commerce, and enhancement of user experience. Factoring in all of these things to your WordPress site will help you in the long run.

ICanLocalize has recently released a set of WordPress plugins designed to make the difficult process of translating a website into another language much easier.

The biggest feature of their system is obviously the translation mechanism. Here is how it works (from their website):

Our system produces a translated blog with contents that are based on the original language blog. Whenever there are new contents or when contents update on the original language blog, they are sent to translators. The translations are then published in the translated blog.

The entire process is fully automated. Bloggers don’t need to spend any time administrating the translation. From the translators’ point of view, the process is seamless. They are notified whenever there is new work and translate inside ICanLocalize’s system. Translations are being sent automatically and published.

And the results are great. If you have ever tried to translate a website using an online tool I am sure you have realized how inadequate it can be. Don’t get me wrong, Google Translate and Babelfish have their uses, but nothing can compare to a professional human translator, writing in his or her native language.

More than just translation

ICanLocalize offers more than just translation. They have created several other WordPress plugins that compliment the translation service but are beneficial without it. For example, the CMS Navigation plugin provides “out-of-the-box support for full CMS navigation in your WordPress site including drop down menus, breadcrumbs trail and sidebar navigation.”

The Absolute Links plugin “prevents dead links between any post or page by guaranteeing that all links always point to the current addresses (permlinks).” I could have used that one on a project that I recently completed which required non-technical people to deploy a WordPress blog in test and transfer it to a production site with a different URL.

Each individual plugin is great but the whole package of plugins, used together, allow you to do things that are difficult to do otherwise. They are all GPL and in the WordPress plugin repository. Check it out and let us know what you think!

If you answered “Hand ‘em a couple more client guides!” you would be correct.
These two client guides take it up a tiny notch by showing your client how to manage user accounts and check out their statistics.

For these to work you will need to make sure that the client account has the proper permissions (we know you’re not letting them loose as an admin). You will also need to enable the Statistics module.

Guide 3 Downloads

• How to Manage Users- PDF
• How to Manage Users – DOC

Guide 4 Downloads

• How to Check Site Statistics – PDF
• How to Check Site Statistics – DOC

So what am I talking about, really?

Plugin Overload

Sometimes you stumble over a cool feature that someone has on his or her website. You want it for your own, or your client wants it for their site. Googling it will find a solution, of course, and it might be a plugin for the CMS you’re using.

Excellent! Install! Blam! It’s up!

Then it happens again. And again. It goes on and on, and suddenly you have 20+ plugins installed, and you’re wondering why the reader stats are going down.

The ease of adding plugins makes us sometime forget 5 things:

1. Extending the CMS with plugins might strain it more.
2. Additional functionality usually means additional database queries, calls to scripting actions, or whatever.
3. Widgets hosted on a different server can hog up a site, just because the server they are on isn’t responding properly.
4. Too many things at once might clash, because the developers didn’t take everything into consideration.
5. Cramming too many features in one place will most likely make it cluttered and unfocused.

It is very easy to just download a plugin and extend our CMS today. A lot of times that is a good thing, but sometimes it goes too far. There really is no telling how well two different plugins will work together. A lot work perfectly well, but some might clash due to poor programming or coincidence. After all, there is no way that the developer can test his work with everything out there, now is there?

There’s also the matter of load times. First of all, the more you put on a site, the bigger it will get and the slower it will load. This is less of an issue today, with high speed internet access, but it is still an issue. Second, if you use external services, like Share This or Disqus for instance, you will have to wait for them before you can use their functionality. If they are implemented right, the rest of the site will load, but that is not always the case. Third, people are impatient, high speed internet access or not – they want everything to happen the moment they click. So when someone finds a link to your Kick Ass Super Duper Post Of Brilliance, clicks in anticipation of reading something genius, and then it loads slooowly, you might just have lost a faithful reader.

Finally, there is something called two many features as well. Do you really need everything you clutter your site with? Just browsing the blogosphere tells me that the case is usually “probably not”…

The Plugin Rule

So what can you do? I have something I call the Plugin Rule. Basically, it goes something like this:

Never add a plugin for a feature your CMS can do with a little bit of custom coding.

Now, there’s the issue of actually doing that custom coding as well. Let’s say you’re running a WordPress blog and want a submit to Reddit link. You could do that with Share This, with one of the numerous plugins, or you could hack the theme template and add the submit link there. The ideal solution is the last one, since it relies on no plugins nor external services, but not everyone is capable of doing that. They should, of course, choose a plugin that gets the job done. That is, if they really need the feature – otherwise just forget about it.

It all boils down to your level of expertise of course, but try and avoid using plugins for everything. Always search for a less obtrusive solution. And perhaps most important of all: Always question the need of the added functionality. After all, less is sometimes actually more.

Andy, Scott, and everyone else involved in the project have included everything that a designer needs to get right to the fun stuff. It’s a veritable theme Mecca that, IMHO, is unmatched by many other “modder” themes. These are some of the highlights.

1. Cross Platform

The Sandbox theme is now available on many systems such as WordPress, Drupal, and even Movable Type. If you are anything like me, you are probably getting tired of redoing your site design every single time you change platforms (which is frequently). Sandbox makes it easy to move your design to a new platform.

2. Time Saver

You don’t have to spend time validating your theme—it is already validated. You don’t have to spend time creating custom functions and widgets—they have already been made. Nor do you have to spend hours setting up every theme file—they have been created too. You just upload it, activate it, and style it. That’s all.

3. Microformats

Microformats are crammed into just about every place they could possibly fit. What does this mean for you? It means that your website has loads of extra information (meta) that can be used in some neat ways. Check out the Operator plug-in for Firefox to start seeing Microformats in action all over the web.

4. Flexibility

Sandbox has lots of useful classes and id’s throughout. For example, say you would like to style each section of your site differently. Sandbox adds a whole slew of classes to the body tag that can help you out. What if you want to style posts tagged as “quote” differently than the rest of the posts? Again, Sandbox provides a myriad of classes for each post. You can style virtually anything without any coding!

5. The kitchen sink

As if those weren’t compelling enough reasons to use the Sandbox theme, it also boasts localization (currently with 10 languages and counting), incredible documentation, regular maintenance, a large community of users, standards compliance, a GPL license, and a whole host of ready-made designs. What’s not to love!

So you just finished that Drupal-powered site for your client. The problem is they don’t know how to use it. Avoid explaining the same simple tasks repeatedly with these simple, printable client guides.

The first guide will walk your client through the process of logging in. The second guide is a gentle introduction to managing content with Drupal.

We’ve made a few a few assumptions in order to keep these as simple as possible for even the most computer-illiterate user.

• Clean URLs is enabled
• User has the ability to add, edit, and delete a Story
• Defaults have been set for the Story content type
• The administration menu is enabled and visible

If you have created custom content types, or would prefer your client to use the Page content type, simply edit the Word document provided to suit your needs. If you have a basic site then you can probably just use the PDF versions.

Guide 1 Downloads

• How to Log In to Your Website – PDF
• How to Log In to Your Website – DOC

Guide 2 Downloads

• Managing Content – PDF
• Managing Content – DOC