About

Introduction / Features / Screenshots / Demo / Requirements / License

Introduction

With its simplicity and ease-of-use, Orbis CMS aims to help you deliver a better, simpler editing interface to your non-technical clients, ultimately increasing client satisfaction. At the same time, this open source project is an attempt to make high-quality, branded content management accessible to all web professionals - without price tags or small print.

Orbis should not be compared to big guns like WordPress and Joomla!. If you're looking for an enterprise-grade CMS, Orbis is not for you. If you are, however, looking for a CMS that allows you to define exactly what your clients can edit, can easily be integrated with your beautiful designs and is extremely easy to use, Orbis might just be the secret ingredient you need for a potent web solution.

Features

Orbis is very adaptable and can be customised very easily. By default, it comes with the following features:

• You define what your clients edit. To include editable data in your design, simply include <?php echo(orbis_data([page name],[section name])); ?> where you'd like the content to appear. You can then define the type of content (text/image) in the CMS to allow your clients to edit the section with a specialized editor.
• Content edited by clients won't mess up your design. Orbis uses WYMeditor, a standards-compliant WYSIWYM editor, to provide users with a graphical interface to editing text content. For image sections, users can use the built-in image editor to define attributes such as the title and alternative text.
• Orbis can easily be branded. Branding can easily be done through the replacement of the site-wide header logo. Furthermore, the whole CMS uses external CSS definitions to style its interface. If you can do CSS, you can do Orbis branding.
• Clients won't be intimidated by an unfriendly interface. The default Orbis theme uses soft, warm colours to make the user feel at home. Along with that, the language throughout the CMS is casual and easy to understand.
• Orbis is easy to use and has nearly no learning curve. With its intuitive interface and clear, informative language, the interface brings power to the hands of the non-technical.
• Orbis is self-hosted. You always have control over your CMS. Self-hosting also cuts out dependency on a central server to be operational.
• Orbis is open source. It's free as in "free speech" and "free beer". You are encouraged to use it in the spirit of open source.

To get a better idea of Orbis's features, spend a few minutes playing around with the demo. You can also view and suggest more features on the roadmap for future development.

Screenshots

Hover on the thumbnails below to see a description. Click to see a full screenshot.

Demo

A demo is available at OpenSourceCMS.com. The demo is re-installed and refreshed every two hours. You can access the demo from the Orbis CMS project listing.

Requirements

Orbis makes use of a PHP function to serve as an interface between the database-driven content and the website. Your server will need to be able to support PHP 5. The CMS requires one MySQL 5 database for data storage.

NOTE: Although your website's pages would normally have to be PHP (.php) files, you can easily configure your server to parse any file (including HTML) as PHP. For extended information, take a look at the developer documentation.

License

Orbis has been created with the hope that it will be used in an open source spirit. You're welcome to use it for non-commercial and commercial purposes. All we ask, apart from the things in the license below, is that you keep the footer text in the CMS ("Powered by Orbis CMS"), with the link to this website, intact. If you really need to remove it, contact Novo Web Solutions for further info.

The whole Orbis CMS is licensed under the open source BSD license, an approved OSI license. Please read it below before installing Orbis.