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A Flash CMS is a good option to deliver projects to your clients when they want to manage and change the content easly, without programming knowledge and avoiding to edit the flash files. Today, we show you the free available options which you should bear in mind before decide to go on Premium Products. Developing your own Flash CMS it requires lot’s of time to research and develop. Therefore, you should try one of the following options which will save you time and money.

The aim of this article is to show you available options that present a full Flash Front End, no matter if the back end is using a PHP or other kind os script / platform. Now lets take a look!

GLU (Currently on Beta)

GLU is a sophisticated, next generation rich media platform, intelligently combining a rich media community, management system and flexible development framework.

In so doing GLU brings together a cross-section of online Communities, Designers, Developers, Content Providers and Commercial Enterprise.

GLU provides the bond and creates the synergies for these audiences to collaborate, create and participate in engaging user experiences. This is achieved through its Rich Media Management System and Flexible Development Framework.

Rich Media Management System

GLU’s Rich Media Management System (“RMMS”) is a web-based administration interface which features:

- MANAGEMENT, capabilities for rich media projects,

- MODERATION, for user generated content,

- MEDIA ENCODING, and publishing in real-time, and

- DELIVERY, of content to end-users.

The GLU have various features which you can check your self, but i would like to remark the following:

• Google Analytics Event Tracking – use your own GA IDs;
• Google Analytics Page View Tracking;
• ActionScript 2.0
• ActionScript 3.0
• Real-time media encoding;

Where to start:

• Official tutorial page
• Request a free account to test it at account register page

Silex

SILEX is an open source RIA which lets you build Flash websites for Flash Player 7, 8 and 9. All multimedia file formats can be assembled in SILEX WYSIWYG editor for publishing website online, in a local computer and on CD-R.

Features

• Intergation with CS3;
• Automatic SEO system;
• Multilingual Contexts Management;
• online editing (RIA) – intuitive WYSIWYG;
• layout system and themes;
• components system;
• automatic deep linking;
• automatic HTML version generated on the fly for search engines;
• Flash ActionScript API;
• rich text player with wiki syntax;
• integration with other open sources applications (such as Wordpress);

Requirements for web deployment

• PHP5 Hosting;

Where to start

• Look at the Online demo
• Browse the documentation and see some samples

Secretary (Free for open-source or non-profit projects)

Secretary is an, easy to use easy to set up, content management system. It’s specifically made for flash and comes with some very need tools for flash-developers. The front-end gives the user a unique and smooth experience and makes the administration very inviting. However, an integration between Secretary and other open source applications might be painfull, as Secretary is a full Flash site.

Features

• Dynamic xml structure;
• Very simple Installation (Copy files to your server);
• WYSIWYG texteditor;
• Secure 128 bit password protection;
• Dynamic thumbnail generation;
• Drag’n’drop editing;
• Dynamic font loading;
• Developer framework for xml parsing and loading;
• Simple and nice userexperiense;
• Easy search and rss integration;
• Extendible userinterface;

Where to start

• See the official page for more info

FlashMoto (Currently on Beta)

Flash Moto CMS is a revolutionary content management system aimed at Flash developers and designed to simplify the publication of Web content to Flash websites. Our Flash CMS is fast, flexible and extensible. It provides a powerful development platform that enables you to extend functionality with presentation. The ease of use and richness of Flash CMS were reached due to the diligent work and great efforts of our team of professionals.

Where to start

• Flashmoto blog
• Getting started demo video

10CMS

10CMS is a platform for building and deploying User eXperience Applications (UXAs). A number of pre-build UXAs are available from 10CMS for customization, or completely new can be created. These components extend the standard Flash Professional components with in-line WYSIWYG content editing and XML management capabilities.

Works with SWFObject and SWFAddress to enable SEO, and data is stored in XML.

Where to start:

• Demo page

TypoFlash

Typoflash.net have developed a new convenient interface where you can edit all elements of Flash websites either images or any other content. New images can be easily added to your Flash website and existing images can be replaced, re-sized and etc. Creating search engine friendly urls and editing existing ones isn’t a problem as well.

Features

• extends Typo3 CMS to manage any flash content;
• makes it possible to maintain both html and flash version of the same data;
• harnesses flash remoting communication;
• makes extensive use of caching of complex data queries;
• full multilanguage support;
• implements many search engine optimization features;
• is userfriendly, ie. enables bookmarking, use of backbutton and deeplinking;
• is your friend when you want to boost your data driven site with features such as fullscreen video and playing mp3;
• is a framework for Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) within Typo3;
• supports both AS2 and AS3;
• supports AMFPHP;

Requirements

• Typo3 CMS;

Where to start

• Based on typo3, you can find getting started tutorials here

FlashDance CMS

FlashDance CMS is a flash Content Management System framework and application to build and maintain flash web sites and flash offline projects. It provides developers an extendable api and tools to generate a customized web site or flash presentation with a built in and also customizable Content management system. And end users a fairly easy way to build / maintain their site. The weak point on this nice option is that doesn’t accepts Actionscript 3.0.

• Multilingual content development.
• Customizable navigation sidebars and menus with different visuals and functions.
• Sectionwise page headers if wanted.
• Some breadcrumbs implementation.
• Drag and Drop WYSIWYG page content editing with CSS support.
• You may develop new custom components and plugins from scratch using core API calls and connections through a notification system.
• You may also do this by modifying and recompiling from original fla or actionscript sources.
• SwfAddress integration is default, and allows the use of SEO URLs, deep linking, back and forward browser button functionality and per page title customization.
• Audio and Video Players and Playlists (in development, almost finished)
• Easylly skin default audio and media players, either via swfmill and MTASC or by editing original -skin only- fla files. (in development, almost finished)
• Flexible and feature rich Photo Gallery plugin you may also customize, fully AS2 both in website Engine and Admin.
• Some metadata and other HTML handling from configurations
• Lots of reusable code for animation tweening, user interfaces, and event handling.
• Many custom built (or borrowed) lightweight ui components for use on any project. (Scrollbars, scrollpad, SimpleList, Combos, tooltips, really simple buttons, ruler set, tree, various form fields)
• Lots of PHP code to handle uploads, file and directory listings, exif handling on jpgs, mailing etc…
• SQL files provided to build default user admin tables.

Requirements

• PHP4/5
• MySQL

Where to start

• Offical page

Popularity: 45% [?]

Traffic from search engines is widely considered the best (and cheapest) way to generate traffic to your site. The increasing popularity of search engines has led to the development of a whole industry that revolves around ways to “optimize” websites.

The end result is that many people now think that only “professionals” can help their website rank high within search engines. But, the truth is that anyone can structure their site so they rank high for many keywords.

Below, I have listed 8 simple steps that you can take to optimize your web pages. By following these, you will improve your chances of increasing your rankings:

1) Target one word for each page: A huge mistake that many beginners make is cramming numerous keywords onto every page. Instead of doing this, you should focus on one specific keyword for each page. That way, you can make sure that the page is focusing on that one word without any distractions. If you want to target multiple keywords then it is necessary to create a separate page for each.

2) List your major keywords in the links back to your site: Many search engines, Google being the most famous, have started to take into account the words that are mentioned in the title tag of the links that point to your site. So, a great way to improve your rankings for your keywords is to place it in the title tag.

3) Make your first 100 words on the page keyword rich: Another mistake that most webmasters make is to have a menu on the left-hand side of a website. Since search engines primarily focus on the first 100 words of a website, a left side menu is a misuse of valuable space.

Instead of doing this, you should have your title, description and web copy within the first 100 words of your site. An easy way to do this is to have your menu on the right instead of the standard left-hand side.

But, since the left-handed menu is now commonplace, you can also choose to put your first 100 words above the left-handed menu, so this text will be the first thing read on your website.

4) Insert the keyword into your title tag: In the source code of most pages are “header tags” (also known as Meta tags), which help search engines understand the content of the page.

To fully optimize your website, you can tweak the source code of the page. The first step is to insert the keyword in the title tag. (This is what is shown in the results of a search engine when your site is listed)

5) Insert your keywords in the description tag: The description Meta tag is almost as valuable as the title tag. The information in this tag is listed directly below the title tag in search engine results. As a result, a good description can make your website stand out from other listings. To get the prospect to click on your site, it is important to write a snappy description while using your keyword.

6) Insert them into your keywords tag: Like the title and description tags, keyword tags are used to help search engines understand the content of your web page. Although this Meta tag has become less popular, it doesnt hurt to put your keywords here.

7) Place your keyword in the header: When writing the actual text of your site, the first part should be the headline. Whenever a search engine scans your site, it rates all words in the headline as being more important then the rest of the web copy. To take advantage of this, you should have your keyword in the page headline. But, since the header tag (h1) is quite large, you should format it so that it is smaller.

Write your keyword enriched web copy: Now that you have set up the structure of your page, you can write your web copy. While creating the text, you want to include the majority of the keywords at the top and the bottom of the page. In addition, the keyword should be included a few times in the middle. Basically, the common saying is that the keyword density should resemble an hour glass shape.

The total web copy of your page should be about 300-500 words. Also, the keyword should be included about 5-12% of the total words of the page. The percentage varies according to each search engine, so you might want to play around till you find the best results.

If you follow all these steps, you will definitely see an improvement in the search engine rankings for your keywords. The best part is that you do not have to spend any money on the expensive search engine optimizers!

Popularity: 14% [?]

For most people the upcoming holiday season will be one for relaxing and spending quality time with the family. But, for some of us it gives us the opportunity to roll up our sleeves and do some SEO work. Here are 10 suggestions for SEO work which can improve your ranking in time for 2010.

Image Optimisation Tweaks

Optimising images across the site can help drive up web traffic from Google image search and normal search.

1. Rename your images – To help the search engines index and rank your images, you’ll need to help them just a bit. Each product or service should have its own image with a descriptive name as close as possible to the product or service. For example, blue-mobile-cover.jpg has much better potential to rank well for the term ‘blue mobile cover’ than blue-4567-s.jpg.

2. Save in the correct format – Another important factor for optimising images is saving them in the correct format. The best results I’ve seen are when images are saved as .jpg as apposed to tiff or bmp.

3. Populate the ‘alt text’ field – The search engines cannot see the image however they can see its name and alternative text. You can view your ‘alt text’ by surfing your site with the images switched off. Take the time to add ‘alt text’ to each image including the product or service title.

3 Content Optimisation Tweaks

Here we are increasing the worthiness of each page to rank better.

4. Forget the manufacturer’s description and write your own – We all do that at times. We get the product live and use the manufacturer’s description word for word. While it might save you some time, other sites have used the same text as well which will make your version less unique. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel, just add some notes of your own which could be as simple as ‘recommended for…’ or ‘product benefits….’.

5. Use keywords within the text – The keywords for which you’re trying to rank for should appear in the text. Avoid keyword stuffing because mentioning terms 10 times won’t improve your ranking. Instead place the keywords within the context of the page and make sure it reads well. Remember the search engines aren’t your customers, you and I are!

6. Add quality content – One of the best ways to increase your worthiness is to add quality content that your competitors don’t. It could be in the shape of editorial reviews, customer reviews and even how-to guides.

3 Code Optimisation Tweaks

7. Unify homepage versions – Your homepage is your most valuable page in terms of SEO potential. So it makes sense that you’d have one version of it instead of multiple versions. The most common versions of homepage duplication which will require your intervention are wwwand non www versions, .co.uk and .com versions and the biggest perpetrator is different file extensions such as sitename.co.uk/index.php / index.html etc. You should unify around one version of your homepage and set 301 redirects from duplicates to the source.

8. Speed up the site – Google recently announced that at some point during 2010 the speed of your site will effect your ranking. SEO aside, it has always affected your conversion so you should look to improve its speed regardless. The more costly option is to invest in more hosting resources and the cheaper option is to display less products or services on one page,  save images as jpg (see tip 2) and improve your text to code ratio.

9. Find and fix error pages – These 404 error pages could prove to be a pain. Some of them, such as old product pages, old press releases and newsletter copies might have some SEO value as back links. Try and point them to more appropriate pages on your site using 301 redirect to such pages as the product’s category or a closely related product.

A final piece of advice

10. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket – Optimising your site to achieve high levels of web traffic can take time, sweat and a few tries to get it right. In the mean time, look at other channels of traffic such as social networks, paid search and even affiliate marketing.

Good luck in 2010!

This is a guest article by Joseph Eitan founder of Photo Paper Direct. Inkjet consumables online store selling products from Inkjet cartridges to photo paper.

Popularity: 12% [?]

Favicon, also knows as icon for website, shortcut, URL or bookmark. It usually displayed in 16×16 pixel in the browser’s address bar and net to the page’s name in a list of bookmars. Favicons also show up in browsers that support tabbed browsing (Most modern browsers), to help you greater distinguish between each tab.

Owners of a website like to use it as a logo or symbol to represent a website, regardless a blog or e-commercial site.  so collected 15 free favicon generators and Converter online tools that help you to generate favicon from scratch or an image. Details next!

1. iConverticons - iConvert converts and creates Windows, Mac and Linux icons in one step!

2. Favicon.cc - favicon.cc is a tool to create or download favicon.ico icons, that get displayed in the address bar of every browser.

3. Faviconeditor - On this web site you will find the web application to import, edit, and save your favicons as well a tons of information on favicon.

4. Online Fav-Icon Creator – allows creation of 16×16 icons (favicons) using simple drawing tools.

5. Favicon Generator Tool – lets you upload an image (JPG, PNG, or GIF – 100KB max), and easily convert it to a standard 16×16 favicon.ico file for display on your website.

6. Favicon Editor – Make your favicon.ico  be different.

7. Convertico - llows you to convert PNG to ICO (Windows Vista compatible) and ICO to PNG format file, very  fast (you don’t need to install the software and you don’t need to register) and easy to use (you need only 3 clicks to convert the PNG or ICO file)

8. Faviconize – is The Favicon Directory with the goal to list the best favicons around the internet.

9. Faviconr - can make favicons from jpg, gif, and png files. (You can create transparent favicons if your source file is a transparent png or gif file.)

10. Iconfu -  is an easy-to-use free online icon editor, combined with an icon collection of over 12,000 free icons gathered from open-source collections around the world.

11. DeGraeve Favicon Generator – An online favicon editor by Steven DeGraeve, which also offers the option to generate a favicon from an uploaded PNG image.

12. Favicon Maker – Create your own favicons with multiple colours and save.

13. Genfavicon - A favicon (short for favorites icon), are litle icons associated with a particular website or webpage

14. Favicons Drawer

15. favikon is an easy to use online favicon creator. You upload an image, if the image uploaded is bigger than a standard favikon size

Popularity: 16% [?]

Top 10 Free (X)HTML/CSS templates Websites help you to get the best High Quality Free Web Templates and Layouts,

1. Template World – Free XHTML/CSS Website Templates

2. Templateyes - Free Website Templates, Flash Templates, CSS Templates

3. Free-css - Free CSS has over 1000 free CSS templates

4. Styleshout - Free CSS Website Templates, Webdesign & CSS Resources

5. Freecsstemplates - free CSS templates – Free CSS Templates

6. Zymic - Free Templates, Free Tutorials and More

7. free-css-templates – Free CSS templates – Download Free CSS Templates

8. Templatesbox - free website, logo, banner, and flash templates

9. opensourcetemplates - Free CSS and XHTML Website Templates

10. ex-designz – XHTML-CSS Table-less XHTML CSS Web Template

Popularity: 14% [?]

1. FlauntR.com – FlauntR is big on backgrounds, fake magazine covers and basic editing tools.  Gives you the chance to purchase prints of any of your creations.

2. Photoshop Express is absolutely my preferred online photo editor. Probably it’s the best on-line photo editor alternative to desktop products.

3. Slashup it’s a Flash-based on-line clone of Photoshop desktop program, with a lot of interesting features to edit your photo online.

4. Photoshop.com – A good mix of special effects, editing, and all-around good freebie. Even if you haven’t used Photoshop before, this web-based program is very easy to use and straightforward. You don’t even need a manual to use it!

5. Easycropper.com – The guys who made this program have a sense of humor, so it gets a spot here. They state, ” It’s a free tool, so use it at your own risk.

6. Pixlr.com – Free image editor that might remind you of the offline version of Photoshop.  Available in numerous languages and has an API that is free to use.

7. Picture2Life.com – Picture2Life offers numerous tools and shows you an automatic preview for each one as soon as you open them up.

8. DrPic.com – Upload your image to this free image editor and take advantage of their numerous tools and then save it either to your disk or to the Web in your choice of formats.

9. Aviary Phoenix – Allows you to import from photo sharing sites such as Flickr (Flickr) and Facebook (Facebook), work with layers and other tools.

10. PikiPimp.com – PikiPimp offers very simple editing tools, but is heavy on adding “bling,” text, glitter and animations.  Will also let you put your creations on items in your PikiStore.

11. Pixer.us – A free editor with preview and a handful of effects such as colorfix, blur & sharpen, sepia tone and more.  Very straightforward and easy to use.

12. Snipshot.com – This program brings extremely basic photo editing features for those who aren’t familiar with editing software.

13. Picnik.com – Import images from sites such as Photobucket (Photobucket), Picasa (Picasa), Webshots and more.  Also offers numerous tools, fonts and shapes for free. More tools are available with a premium subscription of $24.95 a year.

14. Pixenate.com – Pixenate offers a lot of tools for touching up personal photos, including one specifically for tooth whitening, which is a new one we haven’t seen before.

15. Lunapic.com – Is a bit rudimentary and not quite as smooth as some of the other options out there, but it is free and simple to use.

Popularity: 29% [?]

nomey

Cross-platform

Anomey is a small but effective framework and CMS for developing and maintaining web sites. (GPL)

BIGACE

Cross-platform

BIGACE is a multi-site, multi-language and multi-user Web CMS, whose keypoints are ease of use, speed, flexibility and a simple Installation. (GPL)

CMS Made Simple

Cross-platform

CMS Made Simple provides a fast and easy way to create a web site and manage its contents. (GPL)

CMScout

Cross-platform

CMScout is a free and open-source CMS (Content management system) for Scouting related groups from around the world. (GPL)

CMSimple

Cross-platform

CMSimple is a simple content management system; for the smart maintenance of small commercial or private sites. (AGPL)

DotNetNuke

Windows

DotNetNuke is an open source web application framework written in VB.NET for the ASP.NET framework. (BSD)

Drupal

Cross-platform

Drupal is a free software package that allows an individual or a community of users to easily publish, manage and organize a wide variety of content on a website. (GPL)

Enano

Cross-platform

Enano is a free wiki and portal system that grows with your site – from just a couple of pages to a wiki, a blog, and so much more. (GPL)

Hippo CMS

Cross-platform

Hippo CMS is a enterprise ready user friendly content management system for large sets of information. (Apache)

ImpressCMS

Cross-platform

ImpressCMS is a community developed Content Management System for easily building and maintaining a dynamic web site. (GPL)

Joomla!

Cross-platform

Joomla! is a free, open source content management system for publishing content on the world wide web and intranets. (GPL)

Mambo

Cross-platform

Mambo is a free software / open source content management system for creating and managing websites through a simple web interface. (GPL)

MediaMosa

Cross-platform

MediaMosa is a state-of-the-art, scalable Middleware Media Distribution Platform and facilitates access to, and usage of (shared) storage capacity, metadata databases, transcoding- and streaming servers. (GPL)

nc-cms

Cross-platform

nc-cms is a website Content Management System (CMS) designed with the primary goals of being user friendly and easy to integrate, while retaining the most important features of a modern day CMS. (Zlib)

PHP-Fusion

Cross-platform

PHP-Fusion is a light-weight open-source content management system (CMS) written in PHP. (AGPL)

Plone

Cross-platform

Plone is an open source CMS built on top of the Zope application server. (GPL)

Radiant

Cross-platform

Radiant is a no-fluff, open source content management system designed for small teams. (MIT)

SilverStripe

Cross-platform

SilverStripe is an intuitive content management system atop a powerful programming framework. (BSD)

SPINE

Cross-platform

SPINE is a webbased Content Management System implemented in Perl. (GPL)

Symphony

Cross-platform

Symphony is an open source content management system designed to let developers program exclusively in the XSLT templating language. (MIT)

TYPO3

Cross-platform

TYPO3 is a free and open source enterprise level content management system. (GPL)

TYPOlight

Linux

TYPOlight is a web based content management framework that can easily be extended. (LGPL)

WebGUI

Cross-platform

The WebGUI Content Engine is Web Done Right. It’s the premier platform for managing all your web based content and applications. (GPL)

WordPress

The ultimate  cms ever

XOOPS

Cross-platform

XOOPS is an extensible, OO (Object Oriented), easy to use dynamic web content management system written in PHP. (GPL)

Popularity: 18% [?]

Bitweaver

Cross-platform

Bitweaver is a free and open source web application framework and content management system. (LGPL)

CakePHP

Cross-platform

CakePHP is a rapid development framework for PHP that provides an extensible architecture for developing, maintaining, and deploying applications. (MIT)

Cappuccino

Cross-platform

Cappuccino is an open source framework that makes it easy to build desktop-caliber applications that run in a web browser. (LGPL)

CodeIgniter

Cross-platform

CodeIgniter is an open source Web Application Framework that helps you write kick-ass PHP programs. (Apache)

Django

Cross-platform

Django is a high-level Python Web framework that encourages rapid development and clean, pragmatic design. (BSD)

Dojo

Cross-platform

The Dojo Toolkit is a modular open source JavaScript toolkit, designed to ease the rapid development of cross platform, JavaScript/Ajax based applications and web sites. (BSD)

DotNetNuke

Windows

DotNetNuke is an open source web application framework written in VB.NET for the ASP.NET framework. (BSD)

Ext Core

Cross-platform

Ext Core is a lightweight, high-performance cross-browser JavaScript library for building dynamic web pages. (MIT)

Google Web Toolkit

Linux, Windows, MAC OS X

Google Web Toolkit (GWT) is an open source set of tools that allows web developers to create and maintain complex JavaScript front-end applications in Java. (Apache)

Grails

Cross-platform

Grails is an open-source web application framework that leverages the Groovy language and complements Java Web development. (Apache)

Horde

Cross-platform

Horde is a PHP-based Web application framework. (LGPL)

ICEfaces

Java

ICEfaces is an integrated Ajax application framework that enables Java EE application developers to easily create and deploy thin-client rich Internet applications (RIA) in pure Java. (MPL)

JavaScriptMVC

Cross-platform

JavaScriptMVC is a framework that brings methods to the madness of JavaScript development. (MIT)

Jaws

Cross-platform

Jaws is a Framework and Content Management System for building dynamic web sites. (GPL)

jQuery

Cross-platform

jQuery is a fast and concise JavaScript Library that simplifies HTML document traversing, event handling, animating, and Ajax interactions for rapid web development. (MIT)

Madeam

Cross-platform

Madeam is a rapid application development PHP MVC Framework. It allows quick prototyping and deployment of web applications. (MIT)

MMBase

Cross-platform

MMBase is a relational object mapping tool to create state of the art web applications. (MPL)

MooTools

Cross-platform

MooTools is a compact, modular, Object-Oriented JavaScript framework designed for the intermediate to advanced JavaScript developer. (MIT)

OpenLaszlo

Cross-platform

OpenLaszlo is an open source platform for creating zero-install web applications with the user interface capabilities of desktop client software. (CPL)

pulse

Java

pulse is a framework on top of the Servlet API providing easy to use and easy to extend patterns for creating browser based applications and websites. (GPL)

Qcodo

Cross-platform

The Qcodo Development Framework is an open-source PHP 5 framework that focuses on freeing developers from unnecessary tedious, mundane coding. (MIT)

Ruby on Rails

Cross-platform

Ruby on Rails is a full-stack MVC framework for database-backed web applications that’s optimized for programmer happiness and sustainable productivity. (MIT)

Symfony

Cross-platform

Symfony is a web application framework for PHP projects. (MIT)

WAJAF

Cross-platform

WAJAF is a Javascript framework working on the client browser side, and let you build complete applications without programming a single HTML or Javascript line. (GPL)

Zend

Cross-platform

Zend Framework is an open source, object-oriented web application framework implemented in PHP 5 and licensed under the New BSD License. (BSD)

ZK

Cross-platform

ZK is the most proven Ajax + Mobile framework designed to maximize enterprises operation efficiency and minimize the development cost. (GPL)

Popularity: 9% [?]