So you've stumbled across them. Open Source CMS systems. And are puzzled. What exactly can they do, how can they help me? Why shouldn't I simply go to a consultant, pay a bit of money and let him/her decide, what to use?

Well, you could of course do that. Or you could inform yourself prior to buying service or doing a site by yourself. I'd like to help you here by providing a collection of some of my favourite phpWebSite installations. You can see there, how they are used, how they look like, how they work.

The Linkmanager seems to be some kind of step-son of phpWebSite. Yes, we have a way to collect links, it apparently is saying. Another feature on the list. But is it actually useful?

One of the great things of the currently hyped "Social Bookmarking Tools" like BlinkList.com (very nice, btw.) are the bookmarklets available there. All you need to do to add your currently visited site to your "Blinklist" (=List of Bookmarks) is click a button on your Links-Toolbar.

One thing missing in phpWebSite are site-wide breadcrumbs. Usability experts agree: Bread crumbs aid getting along with a web site. Think for example about the Control Panel, where you are lost as soon as you click onto an icon.

How do you get back except pressing the back button? That depends on the idea the module author had when coding the module. Now, there's an alternative

Two years ago, fredgsanford asked in the phpwsforums about black themes. Back then, no one had created a black theme. Until now, there's still not too many of those. Actually, I don't know of a theme that's totally black on black but that shouldn't be too much of a problem.

I tried creating a theme that's only gray and black, with a hint of green as an accent. You can download it here for free. Enjoy!

Some people fancy a multi-languaged phpWebSite. Some tried out to simply set up multiple sites. Others experimented with branching. There's even a rather underused dynamic translation built into phpWebSite for just that purpose.

I've tried to set up a multi-language site and was successfull. A little bit of programming skills is almost all it takes to hack the modules you need to be able to hold multi-language content.