novella

For more information on novella visit the project home page at http://www.devmade.com/novella.

Also, I write about novella from time to time on my blog at http://www.creativeui.com.

Project Description
Novella is a web-based Content Managment System that is easy to setup, use, and, most importantly, completely free . It is built for the .NET 3.5 framework (there is also a 2.0 version) and uses SQL Server 2005 Express as its database.

The software is free to use, extend, and customize for both personal and commercial use.

Features:
Unbeatable Flexibilty: With most CMS packages it becomes the website. When you design your site you have to take into consideration the strengths and weaknesses of your CMS rather than just building the site that you want. Novella is the opposite. Design your site however you want and then place the content wherever you want.

Developer control: Other CMS software has two levels of users: Admin and Contributor. Novella adds a third, Developer. The developer is the person who is building the site so they have ultimate control as to how the content is used. They get to decide what the admins can and can't do, such as being able to add new pages or users.

CSS Zen Garden-esque: I am a big fan of CSS Zen Garden, and I am not ashamed to admit that I used their style of CSS as a foundation for this tool. The administration side of novella was designed to be completely customizable using only CSS. There is no formatting in the markup so you as the developer have complete control if you need to rebrand or customize the tool in any way.

The basics: Adding, updating, deleting content...autosaving...uploading files...rich text editing. All the standard stuff that clients need to use and maintain the site is here and easy to use.