Croogo - A free open source CakePHP powered CMS for PHP

Croogo is a free web based CMS (Content Management System) for PHP built on the top of CakePHP MVC framework. It was first released on October 07, 2009 by Fahad Ibnay Heylaal. It’s latest version is Croogo-1.3.2 and it could be downloaded here. It is easy to install and easy to use. Some of its hot features are:

Different content types. For example Blog, Node, Page.
Taxonomy i.e. categorization of content.
WYSIWYG Editor with media upload.
Comments with threaded comments, email notifications, moderation, spam protection using Akismet, captcha (using Recaptcha).
RSS feed syndication for individual content, promoted items and comments.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization): Search engine friendly URLs, full controll over meta tags.
Menu Manager.
Blocks.
Contact forms.
File Manager (with editor).
User Management with ACL.
Themes.
Web based administration.

Croogo Author Fahad Ibnay Heylaal seems to have performed good research over popular CMSs in PHP i.e. WordPress, Drupal and Joomla. Consequently Croogo has come up in a good combination of some of their popular features. For example, Croogo seems to have more control over content (also in authors own words) and has taxonomy approach like Drupal, easy to use admin interface as that of WordPress and it is easy to extend as in Joomla. Undoubtedly Croogo seems to has tried to adopt some most popular aspects of Drupal, Joomla and WordPress into one CMS. For CakePHP developers it is worth trying and not to say it’s like another “Cake” treat!

After reading WordPress To Croogo Migration i have started to think about moving my wordpress blog into Croogo as it (Croogo) seems to have everything my blog needs for now. Croogo web home page and themes (management) look like that of WordPress (content rich). It is more easy to create custom theme in CakePHP rather than in WordPress (agree to Matt).

In the first look Croogo looks like the first complete CMS built using CakePHP framework. I am going to give it a try in near future for sure. Thanks to Fahad Ibnay Heylaal for this great work!