sNews - One File Content Managment System

Posted on July 11th, 2006.

sNews is a completely free PHP and MySQL driven tool for publishing and maintaining news articles on a website. Integrating sNews into your existing design is simple, but you could also use sNews on its own, as a simple Content Management System. Consisting of only one file, sNews is extremely lightweight, very easy to install, and easy to use via a simple web interface.

[via:What is sNews?]

If you are a blogger or want to be a blogger but you don’t like Wordpress because you don’t want to make your hand dirty with all of the functions of Wordpress. What you want to do is just blogging. Then, you might take sNews into consideration because it is very simple and easy to use and even more simple than Blogger. If you are using Blogger, you must republish after you’ve made changes to your template or making new post, but not in sNews.

The added value of sNews compared to Blogger is category. You are able to categorize your posting to be put on the built-in archives. Besides, you also can get the translation packs in case you want to blog in other language. Bulgarian, Norwegian, German, Greek, Spanish, Japanese, Dutch, etc are supported, which can be downloaded at the forum.

The most interesting feature about this software is, it’s lightweight. The downloaded zip file is only about 24 KB. The main target of the development team is to give the users more functions but using less code. The skinning part had also drawn my attention. With only 11 functions to be remembered, you can convert any beautiful CSS templates into sNews templates. You can found the instructions on this page. You can use more than one thousand free CSS Templates on your sNews from Open Source Web Design.

This blog engine is a good attempt. Trying to reduce the size without sacrificing the functions is a good idea. No worry about the skinning because all of you can do that. But, since the number of users of this blog engine is still low, you can’t expect sophisticated plug-ins. If you want the most out of your blog, use Wordpress instead. Maybe in the next two years, the community of sNews will be blessed with great community. Just wait and see.

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