Free Solutions for Lightweight Websites

There are many situations when you want to have your own website content presentation made with a given
HTML or XHTML template, but you are using a certain content management system that does not allow you to change its default template in order to suit your needs or the modification process is too complex and requires a lot of time. Fortunately, there are solutions for the case when you want to create a dynamic website that has the layout based on a static HTML or XHTML template.

sNews and NanoCMS are lightweight content management systems that allow you to maintain the website content in any template layout because these CMSs are PHP applications independent of template structure. The process of integration of these content management systems with a given HTML template might take only a few minutes. Both of these CMSs have distribution packages in archived form with a file size less than 30KB.

sNews content management system has a MySQL database back-end and has many more features as compared to NanoCMS, which stores data in flat files. But both content management systems will provide the same functionality in serving data dynamically through PHP. Their limited functionality can be extended by implementing add-ons and the content could be presented in any language, due to the fact that the translation in a new language is very easy to perform or it is provided on the CMS publisher website.

sNews, as well as NanoCMS could also be used as standalone content management systems without the integration in another HTML layout. For this CMS there are many ready-made templates available, either free or commercial. You can develop in a few steps a simple blog or a full featured ecommerce website using sNews CMS, but third party add-ons must be employed in case of complex projects. These two content managers will provide you with flexible alternatives to maintain and develop a website. It is recommended to use the flat file based CMS for a website having a small number of pages, such as a company presentation website.