LigaType Simplicity

To understand what makes LigaType easy, let's think about what makes website building difficult in the first place.

Pages need the same look and feel.  LigaType solves this problem by using a skin for laying out the appearance of your site.  Thats not unusual, and not unique to LigaType.  The problem comes when you want different pages to have a slightly different look, or when you want a whole section of your website to have a slightly different look.  LigaType pulls its skin from within folders first, so you can easily make a skin that's special for a part of your site without affecting the rest of it.

Page names need to be friendly and easy to type.  Most content management systems have URLs that look like this:  mysite.example.com/my/page/102/a.html - with embedded numeric IDs. This is to make it so you can move pages in your site without breaking links.  LigaType has a better solution to that problem, and you don't have to worry about it.  Page links in LigaType are very simple.  Look at the links on this site to see how simple they are.

It's hard to separate style from layout.  But LigaType makes that easy with somewhat standard class names for text styles and id tags in its cascading style sheets for element placement.  All reusable and over-ridable of course.

It's hard to get the links before the content or the content before the links.  But LigaType gives you a way to put content at a broken link really easily, sort of the same way a wiki works.

There were some other design aspects that prompted us to develop LigaType, if you're curious.

Databases make it hard to move CMS sites between machines, to grow with load balancing, and manage consistency.  LigaType doesn't use one.  We think that for most applications a database is silly since generally there are not many pages in a directory, and the metadata for web pages is pretty static anyway.  Where it's not, a module can use a database if it wants to.

CMS systems can be pretty heavy-handed.  Even php templating systems can be heavy.  LigaType is light.  On this machine it seems to serve out about 300 pages a second, without cacheing implemented yet.

It should be trivially easy to set up lots of sites that use the same code base.  Some CMS systems can do this, but not all make it really simple.