README FOR RAM-CMS

About:

RAM-CMS is a simple content management system designed to be portable and easy to use. It includes the ease of management Wiki software offers, without the offbeat wiki markup or heavy database.

RAM-CMS is targeted at those of us that long for a simple solution that is extremely flexible.

RAM-CMS is not a typical Content Management System because we appeal to those that know a little HTML, but don't want to just use plain HTML because of the overhead of maintaining HTML pages. RAM-CMS acts as a combination template system and content organizer, with the added benefit of reduced bandwidth as a result. (In future a web based management system may be developed).

Features:

Example Pages:

A sample website is included to give you some ideas, as I find the best way learn something is by example, and indeed will be more accurate and understood than this documentation :)

The index file is never called directly; it is assumed your server has the index file name set as what Apache would call a "DocumentIndex" - the index.html file is a common example. The reason for this it so index.php can be renamed to index.php3, index.phtml, or index.cgi - depending on how your web server is configured - this is what makes hyperlinks portable between different server editions of RAM-CMS. If your web server does not act this way you will need to modify parts of the code. Most web servers with PHP installed should not require this, however (Perl CGI may be less common, although mod_perl users are likely fine). Note that if your server support a different "DocumentIndex" file name for PHP (like default.php), then simply rename index.php to whatever is configured to be the "DocumentIndex" for PHP scripts. This applies for the other server editions as well (e.g. index.pl to index.cgi)

To link from one page to another the convention is to use the following basic format: <a href="./?page=page-name">Page Name</a> This makes all the pages portable should they be moved in the future, and also hides the underlying technology from user view - Tim Berners-Lee would be proud.

Speed of RAM-CMS:

RAM-CMS is very fast - much faster than virtually all other CMS systems. And RAM-CMS is still getting faster, and the author promises that RAM-CMS will never get slower.

Factors that keep RAM-CMS Fast:

Well Written?

This code is very well written. It is clean and very easy to follow. This code is so well written that it runs on all version of PHP - PHP 3, PHP 4, and PHP 5. From what i've read, it should also run on PHP 6 without modification also. In addition to that, RAM-CMS-Lite has already been ported to Perl with only a few changes required - none of them involving code organization.

FAQ / Q & A

Q. What does RAM-CMS stand for?
A. Well, originally the RAM part stood for the authors initials.
   Now, RAM-CMS in this context stands for 
   "Really Amazingly Modest Content Management System"

Q. What did you use to develop RAM-CMS?
A. I used gedit on Debian GNU/Linux. No RAD tools or fancy IDE's, just gedit 
   and a local Apache2 setup with PHP 3.0.18 and PHP 4.3.10. That and a local 
   php.net mirror from before the official php.net site took off the PHP-version 
   specific info from the doc pages in early 2007. 
   Update: In later versions, I also use "Notepad2" (google it for more info) on 
   MS Windows. Today, I develop RAM-CMS with Notepad2 and gedit - it depends 
   where I happen to be when I decide to do some work on this.

BUGS

A bug tracker is now available at http://savannah.nongnu.org/bugs/?group=ram-cms.

The author of this program can be contacted via: http://savannah.nongnu.org/users/ramnet.

Documentation License

Copyright © 2007,2008 Robert Alex Marder. Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts.
A copy of the license is included in the file FDL.TXT.