What is Reddit's opinion of Elefant CMS?

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We're getting really close to a 2.0 release of the Elefant CMS, and could always use feedback! We've got a small but active and helpful community, and Elefant is very lightweight, with a minimalist UI and a very fast/low memory framework underneath.

As the lead developer of a CMS with a small community, the uphill battle of plugin/add-on/theme numbers does make it tough to convince some people to give it a try. But feature parity between CMSes is never equal, so one may need way less add-ons than another to get the same result. And you're not going to pull many people away from Wordpress by being higher quality (plenty of CMSes win against WP at that one already).

In our case, we do work with the wider PHP community in adopting things like Composer for sharing libraries, and not reinventing the wheel except where we feel it adds substantial value to do so. In fact, we were one of the first CMSes to add Composer support, and all our apps and themes, as well as any 3rd party libraries, can be installed in that way.

I believe the future of CMSes is going to mirror the future of PHP libraries in general in adopting Composer, FIG, etc. to enable better sharing across CMSes and frameworks, which will help reduce the barrier to entry for users to switch between systems, or cherry pick the best combination of components for their particular needs.

It's good to see Drupal moving in that direction already, even though it probably means rewrites for many add-on developers. I'm not sure whether Wordpress can be modernized without a similar break of compatibility, at which point the playing field will be more level across CMSes in terms of compatible add-ons.

You can check ours out at http://www.elefantcms.com

Installation is similar to Wordpress (upload, run web installer, may need to edit permissions depending on the host). Our templates are very clean for designers to work with, and you can easily integrate any front-end stuff you need. It includes a built-in gallery and slideshow, but you're not tied to using them at all.

The one thing we don't have yet is image resizing. We're planning on building a simple add-on that works with a 3rd party service like Aviary.com but haven't actually built that one just yet.

Even if you don't choose to use it, we'd love you to check it out and let us know why not :) Cheers!

If performance is a concern, then Symfony and Zend are both not great options. I did a benchmark of about a dozen frameworks recently to see how the core page routing/request/response cycles stack up, and those two were consistently at the bottom of the pile.

Obviously there's a lot more to choosing a framework than just performance (and other framework layers that affect performance too), but when several frameworks are more than double Sf2 and ZF's speed, that says to me they're over-architected for any public-facing site.

We're always looking for new people, especially designers, over at the Elefant CMS project. We're currently working on a redesign of our website for our 2.0 launch. We're also looking for UI improvements, new themes, just about everything could use a designer's eye! Our community is small but fairly active and very friendly too :)

IMO, this is an increasingly important part of new frameworks. Here's our take on integrating with Backbone, based on their To Do example app:

http://www.elefantcms.com/wiki/Elefant-with-Backbone.js

I believe Laravel and others have fairly similar REST API creation too, so some of this may apply there too.

I'll throw mine into the hat as well: Elefant is a full-featured CMS with a clean, very fast, and minimalist framework underneath. Here's some info on using it to build REST APIs:

• RESTful APIs
• Elefant with Backbone.js - integration/server-side parts are near the bottom

ORM is totally optional, and you can use SQL via:

$res = DB::fetch ('select * from foo where type = ?', 'bar');

DB connections are lazy-loaded and master/slave-aware, and it supports SQLite, MySQL, and Postgres. Even if you don't chose it in the end, I'd love any feedback :)

If you're up for trying a minimal CMS / framework combo, the Elefant CMS may fit your needs. It's quite fast and light-weight, provides an easy-to-use CMS with high quality add-ons for a lot of common things (events, forms, etc), and has a small but active and welcoming community.

Disclaimer: I'm the lead developer.

We use the 1.3.x numbering which will get bumped up to 2.0.0 once it's stable. So it's tagged like this:

• 1.2.2 - Elefant 1.2 stable series
• 1.3.0 - Elefant 1.3 dev series (will be come Elefant 2, so first beta)

Hope that makes more sense. Version numbering is also explained here.

Specifically, we're looking for translators and designers to build new design themes, but also any other help we can get :) We're super close now to a 2.0 release as well, which means we can always use more testers and bug fixers too.

Here's the page in our developer docs that can help new contributors with getting started:

http://www.elefantcms.com/wiki/Contributing

Lately I've just been writing upgrade scripts using my CMS project's app install/upgrade handling. The database API doesn't provide any migration-specific methods except a batch() method for grouped inserts with transactions, but I usually write out my changes in SQL anyway.

When an app is updated (the site being a collection of simple, discrete apps that work together), the system sees the updated version and prompts you to run the update script. Before that, I was doing something similar, but running the scripts from the CLI, where I tend to be most comfortable, and more things can be automated :)

Elefant CMS (my own project) works similarly to Concrete5 with the inline editing. In Elefant, there are edit buttons that sit above the editable content instead of outlines, but it does go to a full page for editing instead of an overlayed dialog window. Technically, neither is true in-page editing like something like this, but both are close enough and I think the practice of just browsing your website to find and edit pages is the key to the intuitive approach for users that both take.

We're pretty new, but we've made a lot of progress in a year, and Elefant is really fast and low memory compared to most CMSes. I'd love any feedback you have even if you don't chose to use it :)

I've been working hard on documentation lately and would love to know its shortcomings and areas that could help make it easier to get started:

http://www.elefantcms.com/documentation

It's a CMS too, but started as a framework that's being used to build a SaaS service. Cheers!