Requirements

CMS Made Simple actually has very minimal requirements. It has been tested on an array of platforms and versions and most of the bugs have been tweaked out. Current requirements are:

   Knowledge requirements

CMS Made Simple is not an entry level content management system. It is a system designed to experienced web professionals to build websites and for non technical people to have a simple way to manage content. To that end, there is some knowledge required by the site builder.

You must have a working knowledge of:

  • internet hosting (domains, IPs...)
  • web-servers (logs, URLs...)
  • web content (xHTML, CSS, images...)
  • remote administration (FTP or SSH, chmod...)
  • databases (creation, back up, restore...)
  • bug reporting (context, how to reproduce...)
  • how to find your servers error logs

   Technical requirements:

  Operating systems
  • Linux/Unix (preferred)
  • Mac OS X*
  • Windows* (not recommended)

*Although we list Windows and Mac OS X as options, it is suggested that these only be used for development purposes and not production sites. Our Development Team primarily works with *nix based servers, so support and vulnerability patches for Windows servers may be limited or non-existent.

  Webserver
  • Apache
  • NGINX
  • LightTPD

*Note: IIS is no longer supported nor recommended.

  PHP

As of CMSMS 2.2.17, PHP 7.4 is the minimum version. PHP 8.3 will provide significant performance improvements.

The PHP versions listed below are for the core only. If you run older or unsupported modules you should test on a development server first.

  • The installation assistant requires the PHAR library enabled.
  • Working PHP sessions
  • Currently supported PHP versions:
    • Minimum: 7.4 - as this version isn't supported by PHP itself anymore it could be insecure.
    • Recommended: 8.3 - you may need 7.4 or 8.1 if you're using older modules.
    • Maximum tested by the Dev Team: 8.3
  • Numerous libraries must be enabled (the install assistant will check for these) including json, tokenizer, xml, and gd. The installer can be used to verify your system has the appropriate libraries, even if you choose not to complete the installation.
  • PHP Tokenizer support. Some hosts don't install tokenizer support for php by default, but this is usually trivial and harmless for them to add.
  • ModSecurity (mod_security) must be disabled. If your host does not allow for it to be disabled, you will run into random issues updating content and changing settings, and will need to have your host whitelist rules one by one.
  • php.ini settings. When CMS Made Simple is installed it will check that you have at least the following: PHP memory limit (minimum 16M, recommend 24M or greater), PHP time limit in seconds (minimum 30, recommend 60 or greater), max post size (minimum 2M, recommend 10M or greater), and max upload file size (minimum 2M, recommend 10M or greater). Note that you will find several posts in the forums where a PHP memory_limit of 64M or even 128M has been recommended.
  • curl extensions (recommended)
  Browser

A session cookies and Javascript enabled admin browser:

  • Firefox
  • Chrome
  • Edge
  • Safari
  • Opera
  General

The application does not need root access, and, in fact, needs very minimal permissions to operate. Write access is only required on a few directories and should be pretty safe for everyday use.

Storage space required (for those with shared hosting plans or quotas to consider) is very dependent upon the modules, files (including images and template graphics), and data you add to your site. At a minimum, you should allow at least 20 MB for a "stock" install with default content. This would not include other files and data stored in your hosting account, such as logs and mail, so your actual hosting plan requirements will likely be more.

Because of caching, there are only a minimal amount of SQL calls per page hit, and systems with only a minimum amount of processor or RAM resources should be able to run it with minimal reduction in performance.