The Origins
You probably guessed it: CMSimple_XH is an offshoot of CMSimple.
CMSimple
was started by the Dane Peter Harteg around the turn of the millenium. He got tired constantly editing the websites of his friends, and wanted to give them an easy possibilty to do the editing themselves.
He deviced a simple websoftware with an ingenius method of creating new pages by adding headlines. He looked at websites as if they were a book: The different pages of a website he regarded like the different chapters of a book. As new chapters in a book are started by big headlines, the same he did with his little software!
The whole content of the website went into just one single html-file. From the six headline levels of html he reserved the first 3 for dividing the website into pages, while the remaining 3 were used for normal structuring of the text. Thus his software was extremly simple, small and needed no database. Installation was also simple: just load it on an internet server, give writing permissions to the content.htm, and you are done.
| 1 CMSimple content.htm file | would give a website with 4 pages |
|
<h1>page a</h1> text text text <h1>page b</h1> text text text <h2>subpage b</h2> text text text <h1>page c</h1> text text text |
page a |
| page b | |
| subpage of b | |
| page c |
After having at first written his little program in Perl, he finally shifted over to PHP. Naming his software CMSimple, he released version 1.0 on 10 April 2003, size: 20.0 KB, on the internet, allowing everybody to use it for free, provided a link to his site was kept visible. Link remove licences could be bought. CMSimple became well known around 2006, when several good plugins became available.
Then development slowed down and practically ceased in 2008. 2009 some users began working on a follow-up version while keeping the compatibility with the original program as far as possible.
How to call it? In agreement with Peter Harteg, who kept the rights to the original name, our version was called CMSimple_XH (X for XHTṀL- and H for HTML-compliance). CMSimple_XH was ready to take off as version 1.0 in December 2009.
So it came just right when Peter Harteg released his software under GPL3 on Jan 1, 2010, freeing it, as well as CMSimple_XH, from any link requirement .
Since then CMSimple_XH has come already a long way to being modern, user friendly and standards compliant, while still keeping the benefits of the original idea.