sNews – A Simple CMS for Simple Websites
sNews CMS is a very free, very simple and very funny to use CMS. It is written in PHP and uses a MySQL database for the data. I tried sNews about a year ago to build a small personal website and got very pleased with its usability and lightweight.
sNews is made of only 6 files: the core file (snews.php), the template file (index.php), the CSS file (style.css), a JavaScript file (admin.js), a language file (EN.php) and a .htaccess. There are several languages, contributed by members of the sNews community, available for you to download.
Originally it comes with a very clean and fast loading template but you can also download templates developed by the already big sNews community. If you are familiar with HTML/CSS you can write your own templates. It is very easy to adapt them to a sNews template file.
It is also possible to install add-ons that extend the content management system’s functionality.
sNews has a very simple administration area that allows users to quickly get acquainted with it. It has a very simple WYSIWYG editor, so it expects you to have some HTML knowledge in order to write your posts or static web pages.
Writing an article or static webpage can be a title and article content creation task. But sNews allows you to configure a lot more in a single article than just the Title and Content. There are a few optional settings that you may change as you like.
As for the features, it supports categories and sub-categories, articles and static web pages. It also has a commenting system to allow your visitors to comment on your posts. Is has a very simple to use file manager that allows you to upload all kinds of files to your server and use them in your website. Besides you can count on an archive section, a contact form, an automatic sitemap generator and RSS feeds.
Originally it comes with some very useful modules: a category list, a search form, a comments list and a latest posts list. But you can download and install other modules made by the community.
As a standards compliant platform, SEF (Search Engine Friendly) URLs were not forgotten. sNews will greatly assist in your site obtaining a good SEO (Search Engine Optimization) ranking.
