This article was last updated 7 years ago, therefore the contents of this post could be out of date.

Every single websites requires their content to showcase in a professional manner and since it’s sometimes very hard for a single person or even a team to do it by themselves, as they look for help in designing &maintaining the sites.

This is where the importance of a great CMS systems pops up as these CMS’s not only help us in creating a great website but also help us in managing and updating the website content, so for today’s round-up you will see a list of 10 Great lightweight CMS’s that are very easy to set up, note that some of these are purely a flat CMS, system’s that contains a mark editor that renders the .md into web pages and even some of them comes in a fully feature WYSIWYG that you see in some of the “big” boy CMS.

1. Anchor CMS

anchor

Anchor is a super-simple and lightweight blogging system that gets you to  just write. As this CMS weighs in smaller than a standard JPG image (~150kb or). It’s gives you the full freedom over your words. You can just write in Markdown or HTML, or whatever you prefer, if you want to add some custom CSS, JavaScript, or an image to your post, you can simply drag the file over to Anchor and if you used to the ol’ famous five-minute install? Well, get ready for Anchor’s tantalising two-minute install.

2. Kirby

kirby

Kirby is another CMS that lets you write your content in Markdown format by default, but there are visual markdown editor plugins that will make writing fun. Kirby’s highly flexible API is  easy to learn & will boost your productivity while you can focus on building high quality site for your and your clients. Kirby is file-based that means no database are involved in the process, this means first class performance, version controllable content, simple backups and many other awesome side effects.

3. Fork

fork

Fork CMS is dedicated for creating a user friendly environment to build, monitor & update your website content, it’s jam-packed with awesome apps and comes with the territory of being a all round kick-ass Content Management System. Fork have also a wide collection of beautiful themes that been built by talented designers.

Fork CMS has being known as a marketing guru as it is super easy that plays nicely with excising services like Campaign Monitor and Google Analytics.

4. Automad

automad

Automad is a file-based flat CMS + template engine. It’s been designed to be fully portable without any dependencies on databases or fixed locations and doesn’t require any complicated setup process as all data gets stored in a human readable form. Included in this CMS comes a two step caching system that makes your site extremely fast, also it’s comes with a web-based user interface makes it easy (even for beginners ) to manage a website.

The template engine enables designers to build custom themes and templates without PHP knowledge, as the extension interface allows developers to create plugins for all kind of functionality, deployment and backup is not more than copying the Automad directory and it’s also possible to put a whole site under version control using Git or Mercurial.

5. Bolt

bolt

Bolt is an open source Content Management Tool, which strives to be as simple and straightforward as possible. It is quick to set up, easy to configure, uses elegant templates, and above all: It’s a joy to use, for developers it’s a quick to set up and is easily extendible  for you to create anything you need.

The custom types and fields in the flexible content type structure give you all freedom to make your site just as you need it.  Built upon Silex with Symfony components, and bolt uses Twig for its templates, an elegant, flexible and concise templating language, that allows you to write templates the way you want.

6. Pico

pico

Pico is a stupidly simple & blazing fast, flat file CMS which makes creating and maintaining a website as simple as editing text files as it’s a “flat file” CMS, meaning no database, no MySQL queries. It is seriously lightweight and doesn’t use a database, that why its super fast.

You can edit your website in your favourite text editor using simple Markdown formatting. Pico uses the Twig templating engine just like Bolt CMS, for powerful and flexible themes and best of all, Pico is completely free and open source.

7. Grav

grav

In a nutshell  Grav is a Fast, Simple, and Flexible, file-based Web-platform as there are zero installation required. Just extract the ZIP archive, and you are already up and running, as it follows similar principals to other flat-file CMS platforms, but has a different design philosophy than most. Grav comes with a powerful Package Management System to allow for simple installation and upgrading of plugins and themes, as well as simple updating of Grav itself.

Underlying architecture of Grav have been designed to use a well-established and best-in-class technologies, where applicable to ensure that Grav is simple to use and easy to extend.

8. Monstra

Update: Monstra domain seems to be up to renewal, and it currently not active, please

monstra

Monstra is a fast, extensible and modern CMS that is flexible and easy to use. It’s been built using Twitter Bootstrap for the front-end framework, is multi-user friendly, plus it’s database-free. Monstra uses best frontend and backend optimisation practice. Monstra minify HTML,CSS and JS files to Reduce Payload Size. plus it’s combines CSS and JS files to Reduce HTTP Round-Trips.

9. Pagekit

pagekit

Pagekit is a modular and lightweight CMS built with modern technologies like Symfony components and Doctrine. It provides an platform for theme and extension developers. It’s gives you the tools to create beautiful websites, no matter if it’s a simple blog, your company’s website or a web service. Pagekit is published for free under the MIT license so you are free to modify, share and redistribute it without any limitations.

It’s up to you how you want to license your themes and extensions. Use the MIT, GPL or any other license. This gives you as a developer real freedom.

10. WonderCMS

wonder-cms

WonderCMS claims that they have the smallest CMS in the world at the just 15kb on just 7 files yet it’s has cool feature such as editing content in place and you can grab themes,  get plugins to add features to your site such as adding a gallery and a WYSIWYG editor.

 

Share

10 Great Lightweight CMS for Sites Building

Discussion

1 Response

Comments are closed.