Installation

Very easy install. I just simply unpacked the tar.gz file in my webservers root directory and then followed the Quick Install Instructions in the INSTALL.html file. Needed to change the ownership of the files in the public_html directory to www-data first. Also needed to created a database, how to do all these things is explained quite well in the detailed installation instructions so I recommend reading those for people who haven't done many CMS installs before.

Then it is just simply a matter of answering a few questions in the install pages most of which have acceptable defaults already entered, I also chose to install the sample data. Then just click on the Start Using Back-End link and you will be taken to the Front Page.

Using the System

Click on the Login link at the bottom of the page. Login with username "god" and password "password". I was then taken to the administration page where there were a couple of notices reminding me about securing my setup properly. This is pretty good and not something that I have noticed in other CMS installs I have done. I followed the instructions of both notices and when I refreshed the page one of the notices was removed but the other, "chmod 644 /var/www/back-end0.7.0/public_html/*.php stayed there. Looking at it I could see that because I had both owner and group as www-data, www-data therefore had write permissions. Changed the owner to root for everything in the public_html directory

   chown -R root /var/www/back-end0.7.0/public_html/

and refreshed the page and had no more notices. I then had a quick look around the system.

Wow what can I say. This is a very smooth CMS. It is really out of the box with everything you need to get a website going just there. It comes with HtmlArea version 3 included so you have WYSIWYG editing of my content. Things like Printer Friendly, Email to a friend and Pdf versions are also included. Jpcache is also integrated into the system. Also you are supposed to be able to easily use things like mailing lists and a range of other things that NGO groups would be interested in doing. Back-End claims to be a CMS that is aimed at meeting the needs of Not-for-Profits, NGO's and Advocacy groups and a range of other things that NGO groups would be interested in doing. It offers muliti-language capability straight out of the box in a manner that looks quite easy to utilise. It has links to a Wicki based manual, which although a bit sparse at the moment, looks well organised and should encourage good documentation from users. It looks like there will be a little learning curve in understanding how Blocks work and other features of the CMS work but it definitely looks like a whole range of useful tools have been integrated together in this CMS so it is just a matter of learning how to use it rather than having to spend time adding in missing features.