Reviewing ImpressCMS – Is It Right For You?
ImpressCMS came out of the gates quickly in 2009 claiming the title of “Most Promising Open Source CMS”. The goal of ImpressCMS was to make creating content for your website as simple as creating a word document. It is aimed at creating the flexibility to be suited to large businesses to small community users who want a simple blogging platform. It has become a powerful CMS platform very quickly, but is still in the shadows of popular CMS platforms like Drupal and Wordpress. Here is a quick review to shed some light on what ImpressCMS can really do for you.
ImpressCMS Key Features
1. Database Driven
Currently, ImpressCMS supports MySQL and that is it. However, it is quickly being developed to support additional DBMS's as it continues to gain popularity.
2. Modularization
All of the content is managed by separate modules. Installing a module is very simple and is designed to provide the premium features that you need to create a great website. Modules are largely being designed by 3rd parties.
3. User Management
User registration is optional for websites that want to separate registered users from people just browsing the web. This includes specific security measures such as: banning IP's, restricting content by group, database manipulation, form validation and much more.
ImpressCMS also allows for registered users to modify their profiles, use their favorite avatars, and even select their own website themes. The permissions system is very user friendly without sacrificing power.
4. Theme Based
As with most CMS platforms, ImpressCMS is theme based. However, unlike many platforms both admins and users can change the look of the entire website. There are already hundreds of themes to choose from and a large percentage of them are still free.
The next release of ImpressCMS is focusing on both optimizing and standardizing the core code. The stated goals of the next release are to reduce the amount of memory PHP needs to run it, decrease page load times, and reduce the size of download packages. These goals continue to feed the overall theme of ImpressCMS which is to create a lightweight content management system.
While the future is bright for ImpressCMS as they continue to garner support, there are a few potential disadvantages that the community at ImpressCMS must overcome to compete with the big boys.
Potential Drawbacks of ImpressCMS
1. Instant Zero is no longer developing modules for ImpressCMS
Instant Zero created, maintained, and expanded a large majority of the modules for ImpressCMS which means that someone is going to have to pick up the slack. ImpressCMS has assured users that they will be taking over the maintenance of many of these modules, but it will be interesting to see if they can keep up with the modules while still improving ImpressCMS at a consistent and successful rate.
Herve Thouzard, owner of Instant Zero, have been a key figure in creating modules critical to the success of ImpressCMS. Losing such a talented developer is an obvious setback that the community will need to overcome. This is especially true since such a large proportion of ImpressCMS modules are created by 3rd parties.
2. Choosing Their Battle
It will be interesting to see how well the community at ImpressCMS is able to keep the platform lightweight and flexible while trying to make it fit the needs of everyone. It will be important to keep an eye on this as they continue to standardize their core. It can become difficult to be both highly scalable and not have a bloated the core. Very often, lightweight and flexible do not always walk hand-in-hand, if ImpressCMS is forced to choose between one and other it will be interesting to see which path they choose to travel.
ImpressCMS is still very young and already has a very large community that is excited to keep improving their platform. While they may not be the popular choice as of yet, they are on the right track. Baring big setbacks, ImpressCMS could be competing with the likes of Wordpress and Drupal in the near future.
ICMS is a great platform!
We've been using ImpressCMS since it launched and have found it to be wonderful platform to develop on. Our Impress clients have experienced less issues with security than those using other systems such as Drupal or Wordpress, although those are great platforms too as long as you keep the security patches up to date. Anyway, we're very pleased with ImpressCMS and can't recommend it highly enough!
Considering ImpressCms
I have never tried Impress CMS, but maybe I will choose it for my next website. I'm tired of Wordpress already and this one seems like an interesting solution. How high is its learning curve? Is it more newbie friendly like Joomla or hard to learn like Drupal?
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