What's TomatoCMS and what makes it different?

TomatoCMS is an impressive, powerful Content Management System. It's free and open source licensed under GNU GPL.

TomatoCMS considers each web page made up of many different elements called widgets. You can easily create, customize the layout of your site like never before through a visual tool called Layout Editor very easy and convenient. Layout Editor allows you to not only drag, drop but also configure the widgets as well as preview the layout of the site. TomatoCMS has a lot of built-in widgets, and developers can easily create new widgets.

Your Website = { Widgets }

Modules

TomatoCMS follows modular architecture. You can choose the modules which are suitable with your site. TomatoCMS allows you to install and upload a module in its administration section. Also, you can uninstall module whenever don't need it any more.

The most important module is core which allows you to perform general tasks as manage users, permission, layout, etc.

In addition to this, there are a lot of built-in modules which serve most common purpose including ad, category, comment, menu, multimedia, news, poll, tag, upload, utility

Also, it's easy for developers to create their own modules.

Plugins, hooks

TomatoCMS supports plugin, hook architecture for both global and module level. It makes customizing or expanding TomatoCMS's features to match with your requirements to be easy.

In backend, you can install, unistall, config and even upload plugin, hook.

TomatoCMS provide most common plugins, hook, just name a few:

• BadWordsCensor: Replace bad words with ***
• EmotionIcon: Replace special characters like :), :D, etc with emotion icons
• ImageLightbox: Create an images slideshow made of all images in article
• Redirector: Provide ability of redirecting
• MobileAgent: Support browsing your site by most popular mobile devices as iPhone, Smartphone, etc

Template, skin

In addition to Layout Editor which allows you to change page layout, it's easy to switch your site to other template. If you only want to change its look and feel, just use another skin.

By default, TomatoCMS provide templates:

• default: The default template which may be suitable for most users
• blog: This template is built for bloggers

If you have knowledge of CSS, you can even change skin by updating CSS files in backend. Based on TomatoCMS's architecture, developers can customize our built-in templates/skins without writing PHP code, just update HTML and CSS files.

For developers

At the begining of development, TomatoCMS core team selected Zend Framework, jQuery, 960grid as platform for TomatoCMS. Therefore, TomatoCMS follows Model-View-Controller architecture, object oriented model and other design patterns.

In addition, TomatoCMS support plugin, hook architecture. It's probably that developing modules, plugins, hooks and widgets is easy than other CMS.

By using jQuery and 960grid libraries, it's more easy for frontend developers to customize the template and skin.

TomatoCMS also

• Multilingual support: By default, English and Vietnamese are two built-in languages. You can create, edit new language in administrator section
• WYSIWYG Editor: TomatoCMS uses TinyMCE as text editor
• Support SEO better with friendly, customizable URLs; support meta keyword, meta description
• Built-in RSS
• Powerfull permission system based on ACL architecture
• Hight performance: Support replication database connection, caching management, etc

Core Features

• Platform Technology
• Security
• Visual Layout Editor
• Modular Architecture
• Plugin, Hook
• Template, Skin
• Multilingual
• SEO
• High Performance

Built-in Modules

• ad - Manage advertising banner
• category - Categorize news, photos
• comment - Manage comments
• menu - Manage menu
• multimedia - Manage photos, clips
• news - Manage articles
• poll - Manage poll
• tag - Ability of making tags
• upload - Upload images