A lightweight dynamic CMS, database free!

julien Lengrand-Lambert

Jan 9, 2012 • 2 min read

Before choosing Wordpress as a CMS, I searched for a minimalist way to both learn web development and get a nice looking blog. My choice went To Pluxml, which is a french initiative to run websites without databases. This way, you can freely use it on a portable USB key. Everything is based on the XML format. PluXml is a full CMS developed in php which contains lots of tools, from editors to admin menus or comments handling. It supports multiple users with different credentials. I think this is a perfect choice for people that search for a lightweight solution and know a bit of programming languages. In fact, I switched to Wordpress only because I wanted to have a multilingual blog, but still use PluXml for personal use. The only drawback of Pluxml would be its french roots. Almost all the documentation, forums and support that can be found is in french and so are the comments of the php files ! But as its success grows, there should be more english language coming I think . . . The installation is way simple :

Simply download the last version of Pluxml here, and unzip it in the desired folder of your server.

Main install page of pluxml

Connect to the main page of your website. You will be answered to set up the CMS.
Simply click on install if all dependencies you need are installed. Note that you can choose the language you want to use. Immediately, you will be redirected to the main page of your website.
Finally, remove the install.php file that can be found in the sources of pluxml to avoid any security breach.

Your website is now ready for use ! You can change most of the settings, write articles and handle comments in the admin menu : Some admin settings of Pluxml

The system to add plugins is similar to most of CMS, download it on the dedicated page, dowload it in the plugin folder of pluxml and enable it in the admin menu : Plugin activation in pluxml

Lots of themes have been created by the community. They can be downlodaded here. To install a theme, dowload the source, unzip it and dowload it to the themes folder of pluxml's root. Finally, choose it in the admin menu (section "display settings"). Final tip : Most of your information are stored in the parametres.xml file available in the data/configuration folder. You can have an idea of what pluxml can give here ( on my sample server) or in the list of websites powered by Pluxml! Enjoy, and let me know if you need any french translation! Note: I have recently done some cleanup and the sample website is not available any more (It needs a server with PHP to run). However, you can find the source of the [dark theme here](https://github.com/jlengrand/pluxml_theme_darkFuture).

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