My web design partner and Pixelita’s resident graphic artist shot me a link this past Saturday morning right before I was headed out the door to the other job at megalawfirm. I didn’t have time to do more than glance at it before I got home, but by the time I did get home, I was salivating to try it out. What was that link, you say?

http://www.get-simple.info. It’s a link to a great new lightweight CMS called GetSimple CMS, by Chris Cagle. The greatest thing about it, IMHO, is the fact that you don’t even need a database to run it, it uses an XML file. And there’s an “undo” button at nearly every turn! How cool is that?

After dinner on Saturday night, I went ahead and setup a testbed site (those of you who know me could have predicted this, and even predicted the site URL!) at getsimple.mytestbed.com. I had it up and running in under 30 minutes. It took me another 30 minutes to figure out how to deploy the Contact page, but with the help of none other than Chris Cagle himself on the GetSimple Support Forum, that problem was solved straightaway! I then spent another hour or so porting not one but two of our WordPress themes to GetSimple!

I’m very excited about this up and coming CMS for several reasons. First of all, it will nicely serve a niche market for whom CMSs such as WordPress, CMS Made Simple, TextPattern, Drupal, Joomla! and the like are simply overkill. If you have a web design client who wants a modest site, consisting of a few pages (or even many pages, as long as they are not complex), and most especially if your client is not exactly a technophile, GetSimple is perfect. Not only that, if your client has a restricted hosting environment and doesn’t have access to MYSQL, no worries, as GetSimple doesn’t require an SQL database, it uses XML instead. Also handy if your client is going to maintain his or her own web site is the “undo” feature at nearly every turn.

The helpfulness of the small yet growing GS community, the hands-on style of the dev, the great GetSimple-powered web sites that are already sprouting up (more on that in my next article), and I think this little CMS is going to make some noise in the web design community. Mad props to you, Chris Cagle. Keep up the good work.