Welcome to the Yurt CMS
The Yurt CMS is a content management system designed for web developers who create mostly static web sites. This software package has the following distinctive features:
- No Database: Content for mostly static sites resides in editable files, not databases.
- Version Control System Friendly: Web sites built using the Yurt CMS are easy to store in a version control system. This provides you with the ability to have an "unlimited undo"
- Two-step deployment: Starting a new website is as easy as running a single command in the console, then updating your webserver configuration.
- One-step go-live: Yurt CMS websites can be deployed simply by copying a folder.
- Web-based and console-based admin interfaces: Work in the environment where you're most comfortable.
A Bit of Background
I've been constructing websites for customers professionally since 1995. In that time, I have advocated the use of content management systems many times to build websites. Like, I think, most people in the industry, I dreaded the idea of maintaining sites, and figured that it would be easy to get the client to maintain their own site after I built it.
I've participated in the design of many CMS's, and even built a couple myself. Each time I've done so, the result would invariably be the same: The site gets launched, the client gets training on the system, and the next time the client needed a modification done, they'd call on me or my team to make it happen.
I used to think that the reason for this was that the UI for the CMS was too difficult, so whenever it came time to build a new CMS, I would try hard to rework the UI to make things as easy as possible.
Over time, though, I've come to realize that maybe the reason the client wants the web developer to do the work is because they trust us to do it right.
With that insight, I wanted to create a content management system designed to be as efficient to use as possible for web developers. I want to be able to save developers time and keep the quality high. The Yurt CMS is the result.
System requirements
The Yurt CMS has been written in Ruby, and developed on Mac OS X. I believe that this will work well on any Unix-like system with Ruby 1.8.4 (or more recent) installed.
The web front end has been built using the Camping microframework. The style of markup being used is Markdown, which is handled by BlueCloth.
The generated content depends on SSI's to work. Given the design of the SSI's only Apache can host these types of sites. There's no reason why you couldn't alter the package to have PHP or ASP do the same type of work, which may free you to host your site on different types of web servers.
Future Plans
The Yurt CMS will be under continuing development. There are a number of features I wish to add to it to make it more useful to me.