Just like the name implies, this is a TINY content management system. There are no bells, whistles, or widgets. This little system doesn't even use a database (which could be quite useful with some free hosts). This is a truely a less is more approach. You have the option to make pages and that's it.
TinyCMS is so close to fitting my needs for an easy to use CMS for my students. There are a couple of issues that I see that I think I'll need to fix.
First: The default theme has the navigation across the header. For my kids this is going to need to go down a sidebar. We're going to have too many pages to fit into a header and make it look correct.
Second: Image upload and video embeding. To fix this would go against the idea of what TinyCMS is. But I have the feeling that for my kids it's going to be difficult inserting images into their pages as there isn't a native upload ability in the CMS. The kids will either have to figure out how to use an FTP client (which I don't want to teach), or they're going to need to find a site to store their images elsewhere.
I can fix the first issue by creating my own distro for the kids with a different theme set as the default. I don't see how the second issue can be resolved. I suppose I could look at installing an image gallery like Coppermine onto lionscience but I think at that point I'm starting to increase the level of complexity past what I was hoping for.
After playing wiwth TinyCMS for a few more hours I've become more impressed with it. I was able to fix the layout issue. And after looking at the MCE editor there's a button for embeding videos. Since my kids are always on youtube they should be good to go with video embeding with a little instruction. That just leaves explaining image uploading. As long as I can get them to upload their images to someplace other than facebook that should work. (Facebook is blocked by our school servers.)
If you'd like to see my working copy you can go to
jetshack.heliohost.org
At this point I'm going to repackage the software once I've put together a skeleton site. That should help my kids once they get it installed.
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