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Content Management and Wikis that you can use here at SDF

There are many, many tools available for managing content these days, however, in this modern era of individual VPSs and virtual environments like Docker, most new tools are not set up to be implementable by users in a classic public shared server environment, such as we prize here at SDF. Instead, many tools assume that the user is admin on the web server that they want to install a CMS or Wiki, and can control custom configurations.

I have tried several freely available web Content Management System (CMS) and wiki packages, and have determined the following ones can be installed in your user html space and work, as long as you have at least an ARPA membership. Each has certain strengths and weaknesses, and some are designed to be more multi-user, allowing you to have individual contributors that don't need SDF shell accounts. All are designed to allow you to create content from the website itself, not requiring you to log in to your shell account to add or modify content, and to give you an interface that doesn't require you to author content directly in HTML, and to give you templates to give your web site a cohesive look.

The packages listed here also use the regular file system for storage, so an SDF DBA membership is not required for them to work. There are even more web CMSs and wikis, not listed below (Drupal, for example) that do require a database.

CMS and Wiki Options That Only Require ARPA Membership

  • Content Management Systems (CMS)
    • Typesetter CMS: https://github.com/Typesetter/Typesetter Very nice, multi-user, great UI for page design, cool templates. It used to have its own website, but that looks to be abandoned, leaving the github page. You may need look at the PHP 5.1 update fork…
    • GetSimple CMS: https://getsimple-ce.ovh/ Very straightforward. Single admin user. Looks bulletproof
    • Flatpress CMS: https://www.flatpress.org/ A flat-file version of wordpress that you can set up in your own web folder! Fewer features, but fully yours to control. You can use BBCode as markup, or Markdown via plugins if you like. Many templates for your site. Single admin user, though.
    • PivotX CMS: https://github.com/pivotx A nice flat-file CMS that I have been using since 2016. Active development ended in 2017 but it has been in maintenance mode, and honestly still works quite well. Supports multiple admin users and editors, has lots of (dated, but nice) templates for your site.
  • Wikis
    • DokuWiki: https://dokuwiki.org Used at SDF, right here on this wiki start, and is the front page of https://sdfeu.org It's a great, full-featured wiki, with easy configuration, re-skinning and extension-adding using the UI Configuration Manager. Has many cool skins, and several decent Responsive Design skins that look good, and you can make it look not like a wiki with some skins. Has editing buttons to make it so you don't need to know the markup well to use, but also the markup is pretty standardish.
    • PmWiki: https://pmwiki.org Also a fully featured wiki, but with much lower default resources (only 5MB on disk!) for all you really need, and easy to extend with cookbooks. Lots of skins, but just a handful of Responsive Design skins. Configuration, skinning and extension requires copying files and editing a config file in shell. Easy to turn WikiWords back on so it can be a classic quick-to-author wiki experience. Can use Creole markup vs the default, note that pmwiki's native markup is very old school (! and !! for headings, vs ==) and likely not what you're used to, but you can turn on editing buttons like dokuwiki has by default, too. People say it's very easy to make skins for PmWiki.
    • BrutalWiki: https://felix.plesoianu.ro/web/brutal/ (only 40K on disk!?) Much, much smaller here. A simple yet nice looking wiki, super easy to set up with its configuration file, uses a single JSON file for storage of the wiki. You can find all sorts of personal wiki projects online, but this one has an interesting markup language that uses “rocket links” like in the gemini protocol and yet is decently featureful (nested lists, etc). You can turn on a single password for editing, so it has most features you might want (besides versioning). You can definitely use it to get a nice site going quickly. Even has a couple of skins with it that are nice, and with its Brutalist design principles and a viewport config setting, will basically give you Responsive Design. It's not really extensible, if you want that, though source code is available for forking. Here's a demo running on SDF

CMS and Wiki Options That Only Require USER Membership

  • Content Management Systems (CMS)
    • mainly this would be the shell (ksh, zsh, bash, etc), though other tools like awk(1), rcs(1), db(1), or sqlite3(1) can be used to “roll your own” CMS.
  • Wikis
    • AwkiAwki: http://awkiawki.bogosoft.com An AWK-based wiki! Written as a stripped down clone of Ward Cunningham's original wiki engine, AwkiAwki has built-in support for RCS-based versioning, write-protection, theming via CSS, and basic HTML formatting. Being AWK-based, AwkiAwki is very easy to extend in functionality.
web_content_management.txt · Last modified: 2025/03/31 00:35 by peteyboy