On the Cloudways blog there's a new post from author Saquib Rizwan that compares two of the most popular Laravel-based content management systems: OctoberCMS VS AsgardCMS.

Web developers and development agencies around the world love rapid application development. To keep up with the fast pace of development and fulfill client requirements within the deadline, developers often use a CMS. Popular CMS options available today include WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, and Magento. There are times when these established players are not up to the task. In such scenarios, developers often need a flexible and customizable CMS that are often created using the Laravel framework.

In this article, I will compare OctoberCMS and AsgardCMS, the top two Laravel powered CMS.

The article starts with a brief overview of each, describing some background and how their architected. It then lists some of the requirements for each, installation methods, GitHub "profile" and the basic features offered. It then gets into the comparison, sharing some of the pros and cons for each CMS. There's no "winner" in the article as it's just designed to compare.

On the TutsPlus.com site there's a new tutorial posted walking you through the [creation of a flat file CMS] in PHP. It's a simple Slim framework based application that allows the creation of basic pages with a header, footer and sidebar (as well as handling 404s and errors).

In the past tutorials, I have shown you how to create a flat file system content management system (CMS) using Go, Node.js, and Ruby.

In this tutorial, I am going to take the same design model and build a server using PHP. Since PHP isn’t a server by itself, but is usually paired with the Apache web server, I will show you how to set up the Apache web server inside a Vagrant virtual system.

He starts by helping you get the necessary libraries installed via Composer including the parsedown, lightcandy and Slim framework packages. From there it's into the code making:

• the front controller to define routes and set up an error handler
• defining the different templates (header, footer, etc)
• definition of "shortcodes"
• handling page processing (rendering the content into output)

The tutorial finishes off with the details on getting the server up and running: creating a Vagrant instance with Apache and PHP 5 installed and working together and serving code from a shared folder.

On his blog today, Stoyan points out a topic he's started over on the OpenSourceCommunity.org site - What do you think makes a good CMS?.

This year's Packt Publishing awards for the best Open Source CMS are on their way, starting middle of July. I've been selected as a judge in the PHP CMS category. [...] How can one judge something as diverse and liquid as a CMS? Content management comes in all different shapes, some systems focus on solving some problems and they do a better job than another CMS that mainly tackles different types of problems.

He shares the experiences he's had with CMS and companies that have rolled their own in the past as well as a small list of things that he's thinking about making "the standard" for the CMSes to be judged by. Also included is a lengthy list of requirements that he sees that need to be included for any decent CMS to move to the next level.

On his blog today, Stoyan points out a topic he's started over on the OpenSourceCommunity.org site - What do you think makes a good CMS?.

This year's Packt Publishing awards for the best Open Source CMS are on their way, starting middle of July. I've been selected as a judge in the PHP CMS category. [...] How can one judge something as diverse and liquid as a CMS? Content management comes in all different shapes, some systems focus on solving some problems and they do a better job than another CMS that mainly tackles different types of problems.

He shares the experiences he's had with CMS and companies that have rolled their own in the past as well as a small list of things that he's thinking about making "the standard" for the CMSes to be judged by. Also included is a lengthy list of requirements that he sees that need to be included for any decent CMS to move to the next level.