Overview

Barebones CMS is exactly what you expect a high-performance, minimalistic CMS package to be. If you find Drupal, Joomla, WordPress, etc. to be too heavyweight, have sluggish/poor performance, and/or are difficult to use (i.e. don't fit your business model for web development), not looking for a blogging platform or other dedicated solution (e.g. a Wiki), and literally want a blank slate to start from, then Barebones CMS is what you are looking for.

No really, you can stop looking.

Goal

The main goal of Barebones CMS is to provide incredibly useful tools to YOU, the web developer, to get your website up and running quickly while, at the same time, get out of your way of developing said website. As you can imagine, balancing these two aspects is incredibly tricky. Barebones CMS works with how most web designers and organizations design websites.

Barebones CMS is designed to be another tool in your arsenal of tools for web development. Always use the right tool for the job.

License

Barebones CMS is dual-licensed under MIT and LGPL licenses. You get to choose which license you want to use and there are very few restrictions on the use of this product.

Financial donations to cover development costs are sincerely appreciated. If you want professional support for this product, then donating financially is the way to get that support.

Features

There are quite a few features in Barebones CMS and the best way to learn about them is to read the documentation. However, the following list should provide you with a good perspective on what is deemed important by, yours truly, the author of Barebones CMS:

• Secure system. I have years of experience in the security field, have fixed a number of "doozie-level" security holes, and am aware of all the major security exploit types in CMS systems (CSRF, Cookie Monster, etc).
• Clean code. I code like a girl.
• A fantastic, multi-profile caching system that doesn't get in the way.
• Multilingual support system for those who need to translate websites into multiple languages.
• A revision system that acts more like a virtual server. Really useful for creating a virtual test server without needing a separate box.
• Shortcode support through the default Content Widget.
• Widget support - everything on each page is a Widget.
• Plugin support (admin backend only).
• File Explorer. A fast FTP-like interface in the admin.
• Freakishly blazing fast performance - served up approximately 1,700 pages per second during testing on the frontend. The admin is super fast too.
• Extensive AJAX for the admin.
• Admin works under ALL major browsers including IE6. Standards-compliant, Quirks Mode free!
• Start with a literal blank slate for your web design.
• No such thing as a "template". Barebones takes a very different approach that fits better with how web designers typically design websites.
• Three distinct login privilege groups: Developer (i.e. a PHP programmer), Designer (i.e. someone who designs and implements HTML/CSS layouts), and content editors (i.e. those people who you don't want messing up your beautiful design but want to allow to edit the content).
• Relatively painless to move a site or section of a site to another website or subdirectory.
• No database required but the easiest MySQL database interaction class in existence is included for you to optionally use. It is based on years of interacting with databases with countless APIs/functions/classes that are annoying in some way or other.
• SEO built into the system and makes white hat SEO tasks super easy.
• Externally programmable. Roll scripts to execute mass commands with most operations being easy-to-understand function calls.
• Raw HTML output support. If your target client or web server will only take raw HTML and not PHP, the caching system outputs HTML files. Design, visit each page using an automated tool, copy cached HTML files, done!
• No annoying copyright/version display restrictions. That is, no requirement to display "Powered by Barebones v1.x" or other such nonsense. CMS products with known vulnerabilities running on websites are more secure by not being able to be found by a search engine search for the CMS product's name and version.
• Forced cache flushing mechanism for rare circumstances such as moving content to another site/subdirectory or upgrading the core product.
• Three default widgets geared for each of the three privilege groups: Code, Layout, and Content. Each one is completely optional but they are carefully constructed for significantly simplifying common tasks of each group.
• Update notification system for the core, widgets, and plugins. NOTE: Only core update notifications for Barebones CMS 1.0.
• Fantastic documentation of virtually every aspect of the Barebones CMS.
• Several additional products that leverage aspects of the Barebones CMS core without needing Barebones CMS to be installed. These products are self-contained and meant to be used by programmers to quickly develop some sort of extension to an existing system. The license of these products are also your pick of MIT or LGPL.
• (NOT IMPLEMENTED YET) The ability to develop plugins and widgets and release them in such a way that they are scrutinized against the most rigid security and general audits that you've ever seen. Goal: Zero defects. Note to self: Public plugins/widgets must be dual-licensed under MIT and LGPL as well.

There are a ton more features but these are the ones I deem important to Barebones CMS.

What's Next?

At this point you may or may not be convinced that Barebones CMS should be in your arsenal of web development tools. That's fine. Before writing it off though, be sure to read the rest of the Getting Started documentation.

Once you are ready, head on over to Download Barebones CMS.