Hey guys .

I am building a CMS that I am either going to sell or distribute for free. I'm leaning towards free but that is a matter of features offered.

Here's what it does so far:
Produces XHTML Strict valid code
Upload anything at all and it instantly becomes editable via the CMS
NO DATABASE needed, everything is done by directly editing files
Completely customizable style-sheet
File management System
Add, Edit, Delete, Rename Pages
Manage Navigation
Create users with different permissions

The question is... what would you like it to do? What else can I add to make this CMS something that everyone is going to want... Any suggestion is not a bad one. The one thing that I am worried about is that the CMS MUST produce 100% valid code no exceptions. Of course if you upload an invalid document it won't fix any errors, but anything added via the CMS is valid code.

Allow easy module add ons - IE easy for others to develope towards their personal usage and create modules which can be added.

Very interesting. Not sure exactly what most standard CMS (joomla, drupal, modx) lacks, but one thing for sure is usability. I have been wondering about a CMS for a long time now, but I just can't make up my mind. I need it for a site where I present articles and biographies, and where I can easily organise the material, that is the pages themselves, reusable code and files. AND: as I am going to invite other users to participate, it needs to be really easy to use, because many of these people are not very tech savvy.

I guess usability is why I just haven't gotten around to using a CMS myself. I install them, great, but when I start moving around in there I go: "what now then??" I just find it all a mess. Maybe I'm just too used to using DW and organising my sites in a directory with subdirectories and then just upload to the server.

Not sure this was really helpful...

Having dealt with CMS made by others for non-web designers and starting a PHP system I developed myself, here's my two cents:

Multiple content boxes easily editable without knowing code is the most important concept. For instance, the main content area of a site, a text box under the navigation, and a news section in the footer. All the sections could be spread apart in an HTML template, but they may need to be individually updated frequently.

I'd love to see a sensible and simple to use generator for semantic XHTML!

Plugins are soooo important. Support for them are the reason why I gave up on creating my own CMS...


A little more outside of the box, I'd recommend using both flat files and a database when creating/editing pages and files. When I was dealing with saving and adding files on my server using PHP in my CMS, the database tended to be far more reliable in saving information correctly.

Thanks for the replies guys.

The way the CMS works now is it reads a template and makes it usable by the CMS. It doesn't matter what the design is as long as you add the lines of code above and below the portion you want the user to be able to edit.

Let's say you have 3 editable sections on your template. When you click to edit that file it reads the file and finds out which template it is using. It then adds a textbox for each editable field in the template and puts each text in the respective one. So you can edit what you need to edit and not have to worry about searching through all the code. Unlike most CMS's I make it very simple text editing and pick a paragraph style for the content editing of people with no web-design experience. I also have a professionals page which does the same thing but allows HTML.

I'm going to set up a demo soon so I'll post back with the demo. Thanks for the information guys.

The power to be able to edit anything from the admin panel. That would be very useful and it would save people from having to go near HTML/CSS files.