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Thank you for taking the time to read this documentation. 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 CMS is open source. You are encouraged to use this software in the open source spirit: use it, modify it and contribute to it by sharing your modifications with the world.
Given the fact that there are hundreds of CMSs available (many of which are free) to web designers and developers, you may have had to make a hard decision more than once. Often, many of these CMSs are forced to sacrifice simplicity for more features, ease-of-use for more power. Whereas these CMSs are well suited to experienced users with a good understanding of the workings of the web, they are not the best choice for users without extended knowledge and experience. In many cases, these CMSs do exactly the opposite of what they were intended for in the first place: making content management simpler. Orbis CMS is an attempt to return to the basics of content management, adding aesthetics and ease-of-use to the mixture to produce a simple and effective CMS.
You should note that Orbis CMS is not intended as a management solution for fully dynamic, big sites with a vast range of requirements. In these cases, you are better off with a bigger CMS along the lines of WordPress and Joomla!. If you're a web designer looking for a CMS that adjusts to your designs, doesn't need you to limit your designs with a template system and can be 'plugged into' your finished website, Orbis CMS could a viable solution for your situation.
In simple terms, Orbis CMS can be summurized with the following diagram:
Version 1.0.0 marked a transition from a flat-file storage system to database-driven storage system. This development greatly simplifies the way in which Orbis CMS can be integrated and extended in different environments. As the diagram above indicates, pages in a website retrieve section content from the database, using the orbis.php file as interface. Section data is retrieved through a simple database query. On the other end, Orbis CMS modifies the data in the database when a user edits a section's content.
This structure is simple, yet scalable. The 'loose' structure means that other components can easily interact with the content via the database.