My Path to GetSimple

Over the last 20 years I've been involved in the design, construction, testing, and review of a number of websites. I'm convinced that using a content management system, or CMS, is the way to go for most websites. A CMS separates the content of website from its presentation – you edit the content and the CMS looks after presenting it.

Absent a CMS, the required coding can be a daunting task, and it's all too easy for website pages to become disorganized and inconsistent. But there is a cost to using a CMS. Only some things are possible – there will be some limitations with any CMS. The challenge is to find a CMS that offers an appropriate balance of features and ease of use. And what's appropriate will vary from site to site.

There are a number of questions to answer in selecting a CMS:

• Do you want a cloud based CMS?
• Does the CMS need to be multi-user?
• How many features do you want?
• What platform restrictions apply?

The “platform” question sounds technical, but has practical implications. The vast majority of web servers provide either a Windows or a Linux platform, and every CMS needs to run on a web server. I have generally chosen to follow the Linux path. Linux servers are typically more attractively priced than corresponding Windows servers. In what follows, I'll assume a Linux based web server.

Cloud based services are increasingly popular. Everything happens up in the cloud. You focus on content and presentation is taken care of by the cloud based service. It can work well, but I generally find such services too limited and noticeably more expensive than roll-your-own options. Putting a copy of your chosen CMS in space on a rented web server has been my choice in every case in the past.

Which CMS should you choose? I have restricted my attention to open source systems that run on a Linux server. The most popular CMS's in this group are WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal. All three are worthy systems. I've personally used Drupal with a number of sites in the past. But Drupal can be overkill in a number of ways.

One of the not so obvious costs of using a popular CMS is that the threat of a successful attack goes up. Constant vigilance is required to keep the system up-to-date and relatively free from attack. There are not so nice people out there who set loose spiders to troll public websites looking for vulnerabilities. And any not current, popular CMS will have known, exploitable vulnerabilities. And they will be exploited, even on little visited websites.

There is a simplification that I had not given sufficient consideration to in the past. All of the popular open source CMS's are multi-user. Different users can be assigned different rights, and implicitly have different responsibilities. It sounds like a sensible approach. But often there is, and should be, only one person responsible for establishing and maintaining the content on a website. A CMS that has only a single administrator is a much simpler beast - there is no need for graduated access to features.

This thinking led me to GetSimple. It has only a single administrator. It doesn't use a database back-end. It's announced goal is, “everything you need, and nothing you don't.” And it comes remarkably close to meeting that goal. Editing content uses a straight forward WYSISYG editor. Plugins can be easily installed and there are a number of them available to extend the functionality of GetSimple. Themes provide an easy way to change the way content is presented. The tools to simply tweak a theme are ready at hand, and a large number of open source themes are available for installation.

Is this a perfect single user CMS? Not really, … and it's unlikely that any single CMS could ever be “perfect” for all users and all purposes. Not having a backend database, GetSimple will run out of steam when the number of pages gets too large (published estimates put that limit at or above 1,000 pages). Configuring a GetSimple site is not as straight forward as one might wish – too much editing of configuration files is required. And it's difficult to administer a GetSimple site from a smartphone.

One of the “features” of GetSimple is that it's not nearly a popular as something like Drupal. A simple Google search produced 1,300,000 “GetSimple” hits, and 33,300,000 “Drupal” hits (on November 25, 2013) – leading to the conclusion that it would be 30 times more profitable to find a Drupal vulnerability than to find a GetSimple one. Security concerns are correspondingly reduced for a GetSimple site.

I wish that something like GetSimple had been around back when I started to work on websites. It's a worthy competitor for any modest site that will be maintained by one primary administrator. Will you need and be able to use all the complexity that is found in a major CMS? If the answer is maybe not, then GetSimple should be on your short list.