As you know we’ve previously covered more than a handful of CMS solutions, some which also include blogging features. We do this so that we can continue to be present in the much-larger conversation of digital publishing and blogging so that we all can benefit from best practices, innovation, and be spurred on by a little healthy competition.
To be sure there are plenty of CMS and blogging applications out there that are looking pretty lame and that aren’t worth covering as they don’t push us or push the technological envelope for all to achieve greater things. But occasionally we’ll get something that passes through our doors that have us scratching our heads – or at least causing us to pause for a moment and consider what’s being accomplished and done.
Recently I had the latter moment with this CMS:
Anchor CMS, from their own words, is a super-simple and lightweight blog system. Although many blogging applications market themselves as lightweight I wanted to take a deeper look.
Let’s actually take a look at the size differential for a moment, shall we?
It looks like Anchor CMS beats the crap out of WordPress out of the box in terms of installer zip. And yes, Anchor CMS is also a database-driven blogging engine like WordPress (it’s like these three here) so what gives?
Take a look inside and you’ll find that you’re missing a lot of stuff like multiple themes (you can theme it) and plugins, etc, but the size difference really does makes you pause for a moment.
It was designed for creatives and freely available via GitHub:
Anchor CMS: a content management system, written in PHP5, and designed for art–directed blogs. All for free. It’s licensed under the WTFPL.
There are already some sweet themes being developed for it, like Zleek:
And a few others:
I’m digging the simplicity for sure.
Other features right out of the box:
- Markdown, or HTML for publishing.
- Drag and Drop for CSS, JavaScript, or even images. Simple as simple can be.
- Open Source
- Fully i18n compatible. Translate it when you’re ready.
- Custom hooks
- “Two minute” install instead of a “Five minute” install. This made me laugh.
- Extensible.
- Sorry, modern browsers only. No IE6.
For those interested, take a look at it today and give it a spin. It’ll only take a few minutes and you’ll be able to draft quickly your first post.
Anything that you like here that WordPress doesn’t have right out of the box? I’d love for some of the simplicity to be brought into WordPress – every time I see something like this WordPress looks so bloated. Maybe that’s just me.
9 Comments