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the lightweight CMS framework

ZenEngine::About

# What is ZenEngine ?

ZenEngine is a small content management system framework written in PHP. It is mainly targeted toward personal homepages, and has been designed to be as light, extensible and non-intrusive as possible. It may be used for simple websites like this one, weblogs, etc.

ZenEngine is actually composed of the "core" engine itself (ZenEngine/Core), and some packages (actually ZenEngine/ZenFS and ZenEngine/ZenXML, filesystem/XML based content management).

The Core framework is responsible for navigation. Packages - like ZenFS - provides mechanisms to build menus and retrieve content. This separation allows ZenEngine to be used with virtually any data storage system (file system and/or XML or any other text format as for ZenFS and ZenXML, but also SQL databases and probably even output of other programs).


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# What is not ZenEngine ?

Note that ZenEngine is not a full-blown Portal a la PHP-Nuke, nor a collaborative publishing system like SPIP. It's not an out-of-the-box solution, and yes, you'll have to know how to program in PHP and HTML to use it.

Now, note also that ZenEngine could probably be used to create such out-of-the-box solutions.


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# Why ZenEngine ?

At first because I didn't want to hand-write all my personal homepage. I must be a bit lazy, but I hate doing things a computer could do for me. Also, I found that most existing CMS where way too inflexibles and 'intrusives'. And finally, I dont think a SQL database is appropriate for everything. I actually wanted the content of my site to be stored in textual formats like XML, so I could reuse it elsewhere. So I began to write a small php script, that turned into the ZenEngine/Core framework and the ZenFS package.


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# Status

ZenEngine is in alpha stage, which means many things may (and actually will) change in a near future. This is why the doc is pretty basic, somewhat incomplete, and mostly targeted toward PHP developpers. But it is already usable (well, this site is made with it...).

So in a few words : use it at your own risks, and don't flame me if some future version breaks your site.


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# Licence

ZenEngine is distributed under the terms of the General Public Licence, which, in short, means that you can freely use, modify and redistribute it as long as you keep the licence and copyrights.

The terms of this licence do not apply to web pages powered by ZenEngine, but to the framework itself and so to any program, library, package, framework or whatever based upon whole or part of ZenEngine.


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