I’ve gone through several CMS packages trying to find the perfect one. Sure, I understand perfect is relative and the only way to find one that was exactly what I’m after is to write my own. Fortunatly for me, I found Etomite under the CMS-Lite category at OpenSourceCMS.com.
Introduction
The site I was working on needed a CMS, but didn’t need all the features of typical CMS packages. I didn’t need a forum, user logins, blocks, ad rotation, comments, etc. I just wanted an easy way to get pages up without having to resort to normal HTML.
I also wanted fast. Sure, almost every CMS is going to require database access, typically MySQL. No problem. But, static HTML is always going to beat a database backed site. I understand that, and I can live with the performance hit of databases. That said, I’d like a package that is as tuned as possible on queries and doesn’t use more than necessary. Hence the reason for me not wanting all the extra junk that most CMS packages have.
Ease of use and customization was also a big factor. I don’t want to spend a lot of time reading source code just to figure out how to make my site look the way I want. Ideally I should be able to drop some commands into my template and have the CMS take care of it.
CSS instead of tables was also important to me. Not that I’m against tables, they have their place. I just don’t like them for layout.
Last, I wanted something that would do well in search engines. The going theory is that pages like /my-home-page/ do better than index.php?pagenumber=123. Make sense. So, I wanted a package that would use mod_rewrite to handle the URLs.
Enter Etomite 0.6
Honestly, I was worried when I saw 0.6 on the Etomite web page. I’ve had plenty of problems with beta software in the past. For a sub 1.0 release, this is a very stable program. In fact, there is an upcoming 0.7 release that is supposed to be even better.
I’ve found a couple of bugs, but nothing major. And, they’ve been in the adminstration section, so it won’t affect your users. They’re just minor annoyances to you.
Features
Well, it should go without saying that if I’m spending this much time writing this review, Etomite meets all the requirements I listed. For the sake of completeness, I’m going to go ahead and list them…
- Speed – Etomite is remarkably fast. The base template that comes as installed shows how quickly the page loads. Most of my page loads were under 0.1 seconds. And, no more than 8 queries. As comparison, a PHP-Nuke install had almost 40 queries for the index page. Admittedly, I had a bunch of blocks installed, but it was still really slow.
- Search Engine Friendly – One of the option pages allows you to set Etomite to use friendly URLs. In addition, you have the option to put in a prefix and suffix for the file names. Aliases are another option that helps. So, instead of index.php?page=1 or page-1.html, you can have about-me.html. In my case, I used nothing for prefix and a / for suffix, so my pages look like /about-me/.
- Page Caching – This is a cool feature. When a page is built, the program saves a copy of it to a directory on the webserver. The next time that page is served, it is served from the saved file rather than the database. Updates to the page cause the cache file to be deleted. This gives the advantages of a static site without being a truly static site. For those who don’t like this it is an option that can be turned off for individual pages.
- Templates – Etomite has the ability to have multiple templates. Each page is assigned one. This allows sections of your site to have different looks. A template is HTML with simple tags put in where you’d like the data. I built my first template in about 5 minutes.
- Snippets & Chunks – In Etomite, a snippet is a short PHP script that you plug in to your template. The base install has snippets for inserting keywords, breadcrumbs, menus, etc. A chunk is a section of HTML code that you’d like to re-use on more than on page. You can add your own snippets and chunks.
Conclusion
So far, I’ve only been using Etomite for a couple of weeks, so my opinions may be premature. But so far, Etomite appears to be an outstanding package.
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