What's This All About?

A Little Bit of History

Liquid Site was first conceptualized during the summer of 2003 as the direct result of the authors' frustrations with a number of open source Content Management Systems (CMS). It was created as a web solution for the Swedish Committee For Afghanistan and much inspiration and many ideas came from Erik Gustafsson (then Information Coordinator at Swedish Committee). Although originally planned for three months in development, the first version of Liquid Site took a full year to create, although admittedly much of the work was done as a part-time job.

What is a CMS?

Liquid Site is a Content Management System (CMS) for web publishing. Using a CMS instead of static web pages or a custom-programmed web site has several advantages:

• Separation of Content & Design
  The web design can be modified and handled totally independently to the creation of web content, usually by different people.
• Easy Content Creation
  It is normally much easier to create web content with a CMS than with other tools such as text editors or even specialized HTML editors.
• Automatic Publishing & Depublishing
  Publishing and depublishing of web resources based on date and time information is possible, allowing automatic removal of outdated information.
• Versioning
  All versions of each web resource can be kept, making it possible to easily recover from mistakes or errors.

When using a CMS most of these come "for free" compared to a custom web solution. Basing a web site on a CMS platform also mitigates the risk of the web site becoming a dead end, with outdated or unmanageable source code.

Why Use Liquid Site?

Liquid Site is a state-of-the-art CMS that attempts to be easy to use without sacrificing the advantages of a custom web solution. It is written in 100% pure Java and is primarily aimed at small- to medium-traffic sites with dynamic web content, but it should also work well in lots of other scenarios. The main advantages with using Liquid Site compared to other CMS are the following:

• Dynamic Content Structure
  Need to store a corporate document number with some documents? No problem, as content is not limited to a preset collection of fields. Instead you define your own document types with any fields you need.
• Fully Programmable Web Pages
  Need to sort documents backwards according to some criterion? No problem, as the web pages are fully programmable it is easy to modify sorting, filtering, or even to present a different page depending on the user.
• Web Design Any Way You Want It
  Don't like frames? No problem, as the web site design is completely up to you. There are no restrictions, no limits and no compromises. Just you and your HTML.
• Search Engine-friendly URLs
  Like short and meaningful URLs? No problem, as you can have full control over them. Add your keywords to the URL and watch your pages become more relevant in the major search engines. Also, there won't be much trouble when sending URLs in email anymore.
• Multiple Web Site Support
  Want to share user names across several web sites? No problem, as you can create as many web sites as you wish while still sharing the same content and user names.

These are but a few of the reasons to use Liquid Site instead of some other CMS. Others include UTF-8 support, visual content editors and the availability of fully supported and managed hosting.