On top of it, the site is integrated with the always awesome Kirby CMS.

Check it out at houseofkooser.com

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The new website uses Kirby flat file CMS so he can update the content easily anytime. In five short days we were able to complete and launch it. Mario is really passionate with his hobby in photography and now the world can enjoy his work.

Visit Mario Khoe’s website: www.mariokhoe.com

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Below are my thoughts of when to consider of using flat-file based CMS.

Simple website

The website you are building has simple layout with mostly text content. No image gallery, advanced search function, exclusive content, etc. Generally, you do not want to spend half of the development time only to initially set the basic configurations of (more advanced) DB-based CMS.

You or your client is not expecting to keep on expanding the site’s functionality

This is always a hard call as you cannot really tell. One of the great advantage for using WordPress, ProcessWire, or even custom develop your CMS using a framework like CodeIgniter is the abundance list of plugins and extensions. As flat-file CMS is a relatively new trend, the supporting community is still growing and may take longer for a plugin to some popular service to be available for easy integration.

You are working on different servers and need the content to be consistent

Everyone has experienced this no doubt. You work on WordPress-based site on your local server, upload it to staging server to preview, made some content changes based on client’s feedback and frustrated in how to synced it back without having to modify the configuration settings. This becomes easier with flat-file CMS as you can copy the content files over FTP. Better yet, you can set up a repository and have all changes automatically synced.

The user only wants to manage content

Most advanced CMS has become so advanced, its interface becomes more complex and has longer learning curve to use. It is easy for non-tech users to mess with the settings. If the flat-file CMS has an UI, mostly it is only focused to manage the content and minimize the possibility of messing the config.

Your user knows FTP, but not MySQL

Trust me, more end users are familiar with FTP and you realized before. Sometimes they want to be able to login to their FTP and download its content for backup. In case of catastrophe, they will have the security that they can just upload everything and have the website back to operations.

You initially do not need a CMS

Last but not least, it might be good to integrate your static site with flat-file CMS. You may not plan to update it that often and you know HTML very well, but it is always nice to have a more human-friendly format. If this is a client’s site and not a requirement, they will be happy to be given this “bonus” just by spending an extra couple of hours.

For bottom note, I do not mean to highlight issues of DB-based CMS. They have been serving their purposes wonderfully. As a web developer, it is good to have more options available than ever to select a CMS that serves your specifications best.

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What is flat file CMS?

In very short sentence, as the phrase implies: CMS that queries its data from a text file instead of database like MySQL. Typically, flat-file CMS also has leaner structure compared to sometimes bloated fully-featured CMS. This allows you to focus the customization on the content management, instead of features that are not absolutely needed just because other sites have them.

Advantages

• Installation can be done only with an FTP access
• Easier to sync content when developing between development/local and production servers
• Fast, because no queries involved
• Lightweight, smaller total size
• One less password to create or remember (your DB)

Flat file CMS is not a new thing. There are dozens of options out there for you to choose. I have hand-picked few that I like most and compare them. Hopefully by sharing this, it will help you in deciding which that would work best for your projects.

* as of January 2016, based on list available on developer’s website

Which CMS to choose?

Personally I want to get an opportunity to put my hands on Statamic. It is the most expensive, $99 for one commercial website, but it has very simple and nice control panel which is very important. For developers who do not need a control panel, Pico is a very interesting option.

Update May 15, 2014:
I contacted Statamic Team to consult about licensing for a tiny project I was developing. I have not received a reply to this day. I ended up giving Kirby a try because it offered to download the code freely for trial. So far I am liking it and since the license costs less than half of Statamic’s, it is becoming a favorable selection for future projects.

Update October 8, 2014:
With the release of Kirby 2, the team also offer a new pricing model: $19 for Personal license (non-commercial site) and $99 for Pro licence (commercial site). This puts it very similar to the pricing from Statamic. It will be interesting to see which one will be more popular in the near future.

Update January 1, 2016:
Added PulseCMS into comparison table.

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The cause was multiple posts with the same ID had already existed on the new site. This could be because you tried many test posts, or added new post types and populated them before importing from the previous blog.

The solution was from this forum thread. You basically need to make WP Importer to ignore duplicate posts by making small change on the file, which is located on /wp-content/plugins/wordpress-importer/wordpress-importer.php:

[syntax_prettify linenums=””]
// comment the line below out around line 555
// $post_exists = post_exists( $post[‘post_title’], ”, $post[‘post_date’] );
$post_exists = false; // add this line
[/syntax_prettify]

Problem be gone, but do be very careful to make sure you are not importing the same posts twice as you will find a hard time to remove them.

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As with other CMS plug-ins, it is so easy to get lost in the vast list of directory. Especially if it is your first time using ProcessWire for your project. With that in mind, I have hand-selected a few modules that I find very handy and almost always use on for my projects.

Forgot Password

You probably will notice when checking on the admin login panel on ProcessWire that it does not display the forgot password function. It already has the module built-in actually, you just need to activate it by going to Modules > Forgot Password and install Forgot Password module. You can also update the password using APIs following these instructions.

Page Clone

When you are developing and testing a new website, nothing is more annoying than having to fill the mock data. At least it is in my case. So when I discovered that ProcessWire already had a module on its core to easily duplicate a page, I was very happy. To activate it, just go to Modules > Process and install Page Clone.

Admin Theme

Not that the default admin theme is bad or anything, it is way better than most CMS interface of some other platforms, but nothing is wrong for trying to adjust the admin look to yours or you client’s personal preference. There are a number of admin themes that you can pick here. Two of my favorites are Ergo and Teflon.
To install a new admin theme, create a directory called /site/templates-admin/ and place all of the themes files in there.

Thumbnail Cropping

I have to say this was the most waited function since the first time I played around with ProcessWire. You no longer need to create separate field for users to upload the thumbnail of main image. This module can be downloaded here.

Blank Profile

When you download and install ProcessWire it comes with a default template which is a great sample of how to create a website using it. If this is not the first site you are developing on ProcessWire, then using a blank profile allows you to go straight to business after installation.

Site Profile Exporter

Last but not least, the exporter module will allow you to export your templates and data to be used in fresh install of ProcessWire. This comes really handy when you develop the site on a testing server and need to move to production server.

Do you have your own favorite modules? Please share it here.

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When it comes to using it as CMS though, I always struggle to justify it as the way to go. Despite its evolution in complying the demand, it is still far from perfect. In more than one occasion, client would come to me with very specific request to use WordPress to manage their website. If the website needs to come with a blog, then yes it is a good option, but sometimes it is only a company, personal or product profile which content needs to be manageable from CMS.

For years, I had been trying to find the right platform/framework with just enough features and functions to allow me to build a website without having to take more time on integrating it with the CMS. Then I found ProcessWire. Learning about for ProcessWire works was not the easiest, but all the time used has been very well paid off after a couple of projects built using it.

What makes ProcessWire a better CMS than WordPress? For starter, you can define your own fields to be used throughout the system. No plugins or custom functions required, which have always been a real turn off for me. I can list all the goods and bads between these platforms, but in short with ProcessWire you can set it up to go with your site’s structure, while with WordPress I feel it is more about adjusting your site to fit as a template.

So, why should you use it?

1. You prefer to build your own CMS but also knows the pain in making one
2. You hate the idea of installing half a dozen plugins to create that simple customization
3. You are not that good in making custom functions in WordPress
4. You prefer not to have all the long navigation items on the left side of the admin panel
5. You want to it to be super easy to change the template of the admin
6. You need to manipulate lots of images and they have to be easy to manage
7. You want to make sure the user will enter the right input into the fields
8. You do not need to change the front-end template (theme) that often or ever; update: I was referring to WordPress’ manage theme functions which is very rarely used
9. You like to explore new platforms
10. You have worked on a PHP framework and love it

No platform is perfect by all means, and I am pretty sure ProcessWire is not the only one that was built on the idea to make as flexible CMS as possible. But for me it is the first one that really clicked, and it is free! So, kudos to Ryan Cramer and thank you for building and constantly improving this great platform.

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