sNews to the rescue!
A while back I decided that I wanted to make my own CMS (Content Management System) so that future development of client websites would be faster to create. Thus making the client happy to have the website sooner & I'd be happy not to recode for every website. Being the busy man that I am, it went by the wayside behind other things on my long "to do" list.
In the meantime, I had looked at Wordpress as an option. It was good, looked nice, had lots of templates available, but there was something I didn't like about it. I just couldn't put my finger on it. Maybe it was that there was way too much code? I'd want to easily modify the code without wondering what effects it would have on the rest of the website.
I've been a member of openwebdesign.org and I'd seen Solucija News (sNews) mentioned a few times. Then I joined the Solucija IRC channel since it was mentioned at OWD that OWD & Solucija would combine IRC channels. Luka, a lead developer at Solucija was on IRC & I checked out some of his work. I realized that he had some templates at OWD under a different username & I had used one of them. I liked the template so I decided to "kick the tires" of sNews. I figured it couldn't be too bad. I was wrong....it wasn't bad at all, it was fantastic!
sNews does a great deal, with a small amount of code. So small, in fact, that it's easily modified without endangering the rest of the website. It was very easy to implement in to the template I chose. A simple template, but I'm certain it is just as easy in any other. I like sNews so much, I think I'll be canning my own CMS efforts.
I'll be playing around with it more to see what it can do for me. The version that I downloaded is the latest available, 1.4, but version 1.5 is due to come out shortly. I've been told that it has all of the features I thought it was missing and then some. I'll be eagerly waiting for the new version.
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Jun 19, 2006
