BestCloudHostingASP.NET | Best and affordable Frog CMS hosting. Frog CMS is the small, fast wetland amphibian of content management system software. Aptly named, it s small, fast and perfect for users who aren t afraid of a little design and development. It s good for building your own site as well as sites for clients. The learning curve doesn t force you to understand PHP, but it does behoove you to pay attention and expand your PHP horizons.

What is Frog CMS?

Frog has been operating on the same version since August 2009, which is generally a bad sign where software is concerned. When a developer no longer puts out updates to its software, it generally means that the project is going to die. However, we found that this is not necessarily the case. Whatever the developer s reasons for not providing updates, there is still a thriving community base that continually adds extensions, or snippets, for use on websites.

You will likely have to add anything beyond the basic functionality typical in a CMS as a plugin. Again, the framework for Frog is quite barren, likely because no new versions have been released in quite some time. The features it does have begins with Pages. Frog is hierarchical in design, enabling you to go from the homepage to the About page, articles and beyond. Snippets are little components of code that can be inserted anywhere in the system that needs flexibility. It has a built-in file manager but no real mechanism for using images on your pages.

The add-ons, or plugins as they re called in the Frog community, are rather sparse. Either that or they re just poorly advertised because we couldn t find many. Key plugins such as a dashboard function and RSS feeds are available for implementing, but there is a wide range of tools that felt quite sub-par. This is likely due to the fact that the Frog community is anything but big. Still, we found plugins that assisted in a variety of functions for personal and small business purposes on a website.

Overall, the site management interface felt quite simplistic. Compared to other content management system software, this was almost a welcome surprise since little work is required to maintain your site. The unfortunate downside to this, however, is that customization options are limited.

The installation process for Frog is a bit more complex than any of the other CMS software. Rather than simply requiring you to enter database login information and setting up your administrator account, this application requires you to edit some of the installation files. After installing, before you can access the administrator s page, you need to delete the install directory, remove all write permissions from the configuration file and remove several other files for security purposes. Once we figured all of that out, we were in!

Support for Frog content management system software includes a bare-bones developer community, online help and a public forum full of users and developers. This lightweight support seems to be one of the real pertinent criticisms of this CMS, but support will only improve as the community grows.

Ideal for designing a site that s not going to be a blog, pages are the central content format for Frog CMS. It s fast, small and very easy to use for design. The main criticism of this CMS is that it s not as well documented as other systems, but this seems to have a lot to do with the fact that it is just a smaller-scale software in terms of development.