I’ve been doing some research and toying around with various CMS’s lately. In the last couple years I’ve started to come to the realization that building a website from the ground up is almost always unnecessary (especially if building a general website for a client). I’ve since done some work with Drupal, this blog runs on WordPress and after using the PHP framework CodeIgniter I also decided to give ExpressionEngine a chance.

Anyways, there are a lot of CMS’s out there and they all have their purposes. For some reason I feel like testing out FrogCMS so I’m going to do so and write about it here.

Note: FrogCMS is based on the popular RoR CMS RadiantCMS. Just sayin’.

Installing FrogCMS

I’m going to install FrogCMS under Xampp on my Windows machine.

So I’ve downloaded FrogCMS 0.9.5 from madebyfrog.com. As I expected there were files inside.

I check out install.txt and apparently the first thing I’m suppose to do it create a database. That seems reasonable. I pop open the Xampp control panel and click admin to get to phpMyAdmin.

I’m going to call this database gongshop.

The next step is to move all the FrogCMS files into a directory or the root of my webserver. I’m developing locally using Xampp so I’ll be putting my files here: c:\xampp\htdocs\gongshop\. I work on multiple websites in Xampp so I need change the document root in my httpd.conf file (found in: \xampp\apache\conf\).

Note: FrogCMS does not need to run on the root of a site. I could leave the root set as c:\xampp\htdocs\ and reference my FrogCMS installtion like this: http://localhost/gongshop/; but I don’t want to.

Now I need to restart Apache to have these changes take place.

The next step is to hit the FrogCMS /install/ directory in my web browser.

…and boom goes the dynamite, I’ve got an installation page asking me for some db details…

I just type in the name of the database I created a couple minutes ago. My local MySQL has no username or password set (unsecure, but I don’t care right now). I just leave “Database user” as “root” and the password blank and then click Install now

We’ve got some security warnings here. I’m going to ignore those for now because this isn’t going to be a real site + I’m a badass.

So it looks like we’re all set here. You should see a page with your admin login details and a link to the login page. I’m just going to go back to phpMyAdmin for a moment to see what happened in my database.

Nice. Let’s log into the backend of the new site.

Cool (note: your “pages” might look different – I’ve changed a couple things). It looks like we have something going here. I’ll start looking at what I can do with this in the next part but for now let’s just see what we have for a site front-end out of the box.

Alright, looks good.

Next: Playing with FrogCMS (Part 2: The Plan)