CMS Week - DotClear - The Art Company's Blog

Why DotClear?

The first thing that comes to mind when you discover DotClear is the word "simplicity". It comes from what was always the main objective behind the development of the platform: to make a simple blog software, as unbloated as possible and delegating every possible things to plug-ins. To make a parallel with forum software: Dotclear is to WordPress what punBB is to phpBB (or others). Lightweight. dot-CLEAR.

Take the install, for example: not only the setup archive is ridiculously small (about 700KB, to compare to the 9MB of a Typo3), but also it may be one of the easiest ever found for a Web app (well, this very privilege actually goes to a DotClear-inspired CMS called Plume, but DotClear is a very close second). Nothing to say about this, you should have no problem, provided you properly filled the fields. Notice that Dotclear allows both latin-1 (for Westerners) and UTF-8 (for everyone but Klingons).

As always with this type of application, DotClear requires the PHP / MySQL twins. It's released under the GNU GPL licence, and is thus 100% free to use. It's available in English but also in French, since its author (Olivier Meunier) is a French guy.

What does DotClear offer?

First, we're enthusiastic about the basic choices made by the author: full W3C-compliant code, 100% XHTML-strict rendering engine, extensive usage of CSS2, URL rewriting, ATOM/RSS feeds for both articles and comments, and a really user-friendly admin console.

Editing the articles can be done using either a subset of the Wiki syntax (we just love that!), or directly in XHTML for the power users — and there's even a built-in Wiki to XHTML converter! Three levels of editing are available, from the simple 2-line summary to the full multipage article. And you can ask DotClear to ping the links embedded in your posts.

DotClear supports multiple languages. Trackbacks works perfectly (note that Dotclear is able to autodiscover trackbacks, even into cite attributes — q cite or blockquote cite). The search engine is simple but effective and works well, and advanced search capabilities are available via plug-ins. There is no tools for moderating comments, but this, once again, is on purpose, as it should be handled — as usual — by a plug-in. Oh, and the Wiki syntax can be used for comments, too.

What else could we add? Dotclear is search-engine friendly and incorporate an extensive set of metadatas by default. It provides several options to create URIs (and keeps an history of the changes in the semantics so if you change the URI after you published an article, someone linking to your article using an old naming would still get there). DotClear supports categories, of course, and multi- and sub-categories can be managed through — guess what? Yep, a plug-in. And to close the plug-ins topic, you can also use them to manage related pages and get statistics.

One final thing: packages. These are archives that contain either plug-ins or themes. The idea behind the concept is, once again, beautifully simple: it allows you to install additional modules or skins in one click. Just go to the admin interface, open the plug-in manager, and type the URL of the extension or the theme you want to add, et voilà!

So It's Perfect?

Well, no. Keep in mind that DotClear is a "super-blog" engine rather than a CMS. For example, forget about security here — there's not even an embryo of security in it, except the basic user management and the fact that the code itself is secured. Also, the assets manager is very basic, and can be used only for images and photos. Finally, unless you roll back your sleeves and dig in the code, consider that it's a single-site solution, so no multi-site or multi-domain platforms allowed.

Main Features

W3C-conform code
Full trackbacks support
Works with multiple languages
User-friendly administration console
Dual Wiki/XHTML syntax editing with built-in translator
XML/RPC clients support

Strenghts

Simple!
Package engine allows 1-click install for plug-ins and themes
Low requirements (PHP4/MySQL4) help minimize hosting dependencies
Huge number of available plug-ins for nearly every feature you could dream of

Weaknesses

Single-site only
Rudimentary security features
Not the best candidate for your large enterprise project
Very limited assets manager

Conclusion

As you can see, DotClear is intented to let you have a customised, no-bloat, simple-but-not-simplistic blog solution. Every non-essential feature is available as a plug-in. Very easy to set-up and maintain, it is definitely worth a look — and since we did manage to get it running, you certainly can. Add to this the idiot-proof packaging system which lets you forget about FTP and you have a simple, yet powerful solution.

At the time of this article, DotClear v2 is on the way. It's been rewritten from scratch and will offer more CMS-oriented features, like security, multi-blog, … There's a RC1 version available for evaluation purposes from DotClear's website if you feel like trying it.