About The Etomite Project
Etomite was born of the need for a content-orientated Content Management System, as opposed to a community-orientated CMS. Having tried numerous other systems, there were several things which kept bothering me about these systems:
- Often limited to installing skins, instead of being totally in control of the appearance of the site.
- Three column layout. Once again, not enough/ no control over appearance.
- Difficult installations. Even more difficult upgrade routines. I want to fill in a few fields, and the system should do the rest.
- Difficult to add pages. Some of the CMS' I tested didn't even allow me to add a page. I had to add an article, put it in a subsection, add that subsection to a category, import the category into a module... I want to add a page and check a box to say the page is published, that's all.
- Last but certainly not least: too much bloat. Expandability is great, but I didn't need it. Having lots of modules you don't use but which slow the site down is what I call bloat.
To go even further back in time, I'll explain why I needed a CMS. I was building a site for a friend, and I wanted him to be easily able to edit his pages. He doesn't know HTML, PHP, CSS or JavaScript, so I couldn't expect him to edit physical HTML files. I decided to look for a CMS to use on his site, and found the available systems to be either severly lacking or too bloated to be useful for a small, relatively static corporate site. I decided to put the content of his site in a database, and provide a WYSIWYG editor which he could use to edit pages. SimpleCMS was born.
Unfortunately, the name SimpleCMS was already in use. So then I dubbed the system PHPMyWebsite. Which was also taken. After a short stint as [BCMS], the system was eventually named Phase. The first version of the system to be called Phase was version 0.2.1. Since then, things have gained great momentum! It was never my intention to take my hobby project and turn it into a publicly available CMS, but I eventually did...
I never released Phase 0.3, it took me almost four months to code up, having lost interest a little. Deciding to rename it to version 0.4, I released it and carefully started asking my friends to use it. We all saw the potential the system had, and once I got to releasing version 0.5, I decided it was time to take Phase public. I dropped some hints at the opensourcecms.com forums, asking people to take a look at the system, tell me what they thought of it, and before I knew it, people were actually leaving messages at my forums and reporting bugs! Having had a few users say they really love Phase, and that they feel it deserves more coverage and users, I asked to have Phase listed at opensourcecms.com. Phase was listed on the 29th of April and since then things have been going totally mad! 85,000 pages read in the May, compared to April's total of 800 page reads, and Phase downloaded over 2,400 (!) times in May are proving to me that Phase is what a lot of people have been looking for!
Many months later, a wiki and demo were placed online, and then Phase made the transition from cookiebean.com to phasecms.org, where it started to truly establish it's home. A short time after the move, company lawyers of some sort, working for a company where the better part of the name was Phase, contacted us stating that we were violating their trademark. We shortly set up a topic on the forums where people could post their suggestions for a new name, the site experienced a redesign (but still with the same blue and orange 'hard hat' colours), and the name Etomite was chosen out of all the suggestions posted in the topic on the forum. Finally, thousands of instances of the name 'Phase' were changed in the forum, wiki, Phase itself, the site... pretty much everywhere. Ever since, the CMS has been named Etomite.
Why use Etomite?
Why should you choose Etomite over the other systems available? Well, it all depends on what you need a CMS for. Do you need to build a community with forums, user systems and the ability for your visitors to comment on every single piece of content in your site? Then Etomite is not the system you're looking for (unless, of course, you write some fancy snippets or use the snippets in the forums to allow this).
Do you need a fast system, easy to install and use, that centers around content, with an intuitive user interface that lets you define exactly what your site should look like, with a growing yet dedicated community who really want to see Etomite make it big time? Then Etomite is system you need.
Fast, Free, Ultimately Flexible. Etomite.