Introduction
Blis is a Content Management System, a simple one. You might even think it is far from a modern CMS and you could be right. But, supposing it is, why another one? Aren't out there tens of them already? The answer is quite simple: there is no one like this. Well, I couldn't find any to match my conditions.
Why another one?
Maybe you are a software developer, just like me in my spare time. And, supposing you have a project to share, you choose Sourceforge as host. The problem is you don't like to create a full website for your project, maybe you don't have the abilities or the time for such a job. The obvious solution would be to have Mambo, Drupal, WordPress, MediaWiki, DokuWiki or something else doing this job for you. Moreover, you only need a single user on your website, yourself, so the wikis are excluded, you would like to write some technical stuff, so the blogs are excluded, and you don't need a complex portal for this.
I think a simple project, based on simple rules, can give the answer to the questions the big ones can not. These are some features that make Blis unique.
- Dynamic content
- The html pages are created on-the-fly from simple text sources.
- Simple markup language
- The source-pages are text files, using a wiki-style syntax for markup. Do not expect all the wiki features to be implemented, we should keep it reasonably simple, but you can have headings, lists, verbatim environments, anchors, images. Take a look at this page source, for example.
- Theme-based presentation
- The html output is inserted in a html skeleton and css styled. There are no plain html pages, but esthetically improved ones.
- Minimal system requirements
- The disk space is dictated by the number of the available themes and the number of the source pages, blis.cgi itself is very small. One more advantage is the script language: awk. In fact, the interpreter should be GNU Awk (gawk). Compared to Perl, PHP or Python, the interpreter is only one file, an incredibly small file (for its abilities). It should be present on every Linux or BSD system and can be chroot'd easily for an improved security. Combined with a small and fast http server (such as thttpd or lighttpd), the entire project should be able to run on yesterday computers.
- No database requirements
- Yes, this is a feature. You don't need any database to run the website.
- Very simple to install
- You only have to copy some files, set some parameters and you are ready. Ready to write your pages, of course.
Why this name, Blis?
The name was inspired by an Isaac Asimov's Foundation character, Bliss. This name was taken by another OpenSource project, but Blis was not. It is very hard to find a good project name these days... The fact is I like the actual name more than the original one.
