Yes, this is the major change. Starting from today SiteCake will be a free CMS. Starting from tomorrow, we will work on preparing SiteCake for open source. That said, we plan to release SiteCake as a open source CMS by the middle of the year.

SiteCake is free CMS for all but hosting providers or website creation services like GoDaddy, Wix, etc. If you are running a business of that kind and scale then please support us so we can continue the development.

Many times we benefited from the free and open source software and now is our turn to give back. All of the SOPA/PIPA uprising inspired us even more to add our piece of cake to the free and accessible Internet for everybody.  If people lack knowledge to operate and update a website, their voice will not be heard. So, with SiteCake we hope to simplify the effort of online publishing. It’s our call and we plan to do it with your help.

Download SiteCake here and enjoy it!

It’s been quite a time since we released first version of SiteCake. First version has the purpose to gather user comments and show us if there is a market for this kind of CMS. The feedback has been more than positive and more than precious for us.

.htaccess problem

.htaccess configuration was the biggest problem of all. We couldn’t offer support of configuring for each and every hosting provider configuration. So we removed this requirement. As a result you will need to rename your pages from .html to .php and add PHP line to each page of your site. This line is telling the page about the location of SiteCake and will go something like this:

<?php include $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] . “/sitecake/server/sitecake_entry.php”; ?>

Browser Support

This is hard battle to be won. Everybody who is doing websites knows the pain. We know it a bit more since we are using ‘cutting edge’  browsers technologies so standards are even more vague. Anyhow we support (with some bugs on which we are working right now) FireFox, Chrome and Safari browsers on both Mac and PC platforms. IE is beast of old ages and we decided not to tame it but to insert another personality in it. IE users will be prompted with Google Chrome Frame plugin download first time they enter SiteCake editor, after that moment you will never notice the difference again.

No Need For Back Link

We decided not to force users to back link to us. If they want they are welcome, but this will not be the requirement for free version. Free version will be completely free.

No Flash Requirement

Multi upload of images in last version has been done with the help of Flash. It was the only way at that time which worked in all browsers. We dropped Flash and use HTML5 for this task now. Does it mean that SiteCake will work on iPads and other iOS gadgets, yes, in the future, yes.

Works From Any Folder, Not Just Root

This problem has been solved by itself once we dropped .htaccess and introduced .php pages. It’s not big news but I am sure it is handy that you can decide where you will put what on your server.

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And that’s it. I will talk more about new features in next posts.

This is just sneak preview of new toolbar which will come with SiteCake premium version. Free version will have this same toolbar only with fewer modules. In premium version modules will be customizable, so you will be able to create your subset of modules for each of your clients.  Follow the us on twitter for more updates.