la.plume CMS Info
About la.plume micro CMS
My name is Patrick Taylor. I've been building websites since 1998. That said, what follows is a rough explanation of why I wrote this micro CMS.
I dislike websites with pages that take several seconds to load, while the CMS (content management system) used for their construction runs dozens of queries into a large database. You're waiting while information in which you've no interest is processed to pull together what you've actually requested, plus a lot of rubbish you don't want to see.
I also dislike content management systems that require regular upgrades to patch security 'holes', or because a new version has been brought out with features I don't require and the version I'm currently using isn't supported any longer.
So I wrote la.plume to be as simple as it gets. The pages load in a blink, as there's no database to be ploughed through. When a page is requested, the server goes straight to the resource: one text file containing the page content and one php file to format the HTML markup.
Simplicity for intellectual satisfaction
"Less is more" is never so true as on the web. And "think more about less" can be a recipe for success. For instance, when the title of a web page is exactly the same as its H1 heading, and when its filename is exactly the same as the text that links to it in the navigation menu, a semantic harmony can be achieved which is likely to benefit the performance of the page in search rankings, not to mention clarity for the user.
Structural simplicity imposes a useful discipline too. The decision as to whether a link to a page appears in the main navigation menu, or only in a sub-menu on a particular page (or subset of pages), or only within the text of one page, is an important one in terms of prioritising various sections of content. The markup consists of only three structural 'divs': wrap (a containing "wrapper"), content, and menu. On this website the wrapper remains unstyled and is superfluous.
Often, the freedom to avoid much 'thinking' when developing a website can lead to confusion, or even mistakes from which it can be difficult to recover. Or conversely, when the result of careful thought over the simple things is something that performs better than something more complex and fully-featured, there's a certain satisfaction. It's the same kind of satisfaction one gains from having enjoyed a well-planned and perfect backpacking holiday when an easy alternative would have been an expensive cruise with all its wastage and superfluous luxuries.
I've made this featherweight micro CMS purely for my own satisfaction, but anyone is welcome to use it, as there will be even more satisfaction if it performs well out in the wild. It can be downloaded free from the home page »
Additional notes
The CMS character set is UTF-8. There's a test page containing French, German, and Swedish characters, and other bits and pieces, validating as XHTML 1.0 Transitional.