Greg Chapman
WonderCMS

Lightweight Content Managment Software

The WonderCMS
	Home PageThe WonderCMS Home Page, squeezed a little to show menu bar effect you get on a smaller screen.

Background

Originally, this site was hand coded, as were all those listed on the Contact page. If you've read this site's Home page you'll know that it was created to provide identity verification for my Mastodon account. "Toots" on most Mastodon servers, including the one where my account is held, are limited to 500 characters. With that limit I began to wonder if, sometimes, I might want more space to say something. So the idea having a site to which I could add short articles when I'm away from my desktop computer appealed. I would then be able to post links to the articles on Mastodon. Hence I started a search that led to WonderCMS.

Why Choose WonderCMS?

Most content management systems are designed for large organisations, and allow different areas of the site to be managed by a number of editors, sometimes with each editor managing the input of a group of contributors. In contrast, WonderCMS is designed for an individual to use. You don't even need a user name to login and make updates, just a password. Just what I wanted, as it means the software has no bloat unnecessary for my purpose.

As with many software packages, with WonderCMS, a user can select one of a number of "themes" (often referred to as skins in other packages) that allows the user to change the appearance of their web site. With only knowledge of HTML and CSS and the documentation on the page Create theme in 8 easy steps I was able to create the theme I have used on this site and share it with the WonderCMS community. Unlike some other packages I tried, I did not need knowledge of further packages such as "Smarty" or "Bootstrap" in order to understand an existing theme or create a new one.

A sample WonderCMS site

Here we see an image of an almost fresh installation of WonderCMS as it would have been after an early development version of the "GregCustom" theme, which then had a dark colour scheme as the default. In addition a new page has been added, which adds a third navigation menu option.

You can get the theme, which now has the "Light Mono" colour scheme of this site as a default, from GitHub. It includes instructions on how to install it and a range of resources that can help you customise it. (Click on the green "Code" button and select "Download ZIP" from the menu that appears.)

The reason for including the image here is to have something to compare with those you see when reading the pages on the three editors available with which you add your own content.

Further Reading

If you're brand new to web design you may need to know about the importance of the separation of Content and Style when building your site. If it's just WonderCMS you're new to, take a look at my thoughts on the Default Editor, Alternative Editors and External Editors.