For several years my websites run on popular opensource packages, based upon MySQL and PHP.

This blog runs on WordPress, the other sites  (Personal Interest,  Travel,  Weesp,  Retro Computing,  Pascal for Small Computers) on a content management system,  CMS Made Simple. And there is the retro forum based upon PHPBB.

I selected CMS Made Simple  several years ago (see this blog) and this package, now at version 1.7, has lived up to my expectations.  With two themes and five websites it has helped me enormously to maintain the websites. Once configured right, adding content is not requiring any but basic skills.

Simple is something I like. CMS Made Simple has enough  ’out of the box’ power and there are sufficient extensions (like Capcha, FormBuilder) to make me happy. Simple does not mean it takes some effort and knowledge to get started with CMS Made Simple. I wish I had a good guide for the first tasks you encounter. Like installing the software and designing or adapting a theme and install the extensions you want. And moving the websites to another provider.

 Of course there is help at the website of CMS Made Simple in the form of a Wiki and a community forum. But, as to be expected, programmers are good at programming but not so good in explaining how to use their programs! To start with  CMS Made Simple it is expected to be good in html, css,  managing web space rented from a provider, managing MySQL and spending time on the CMS Made Simple website. And do that again when upgrading versions (and do upgrade!) or moving your website to another provider or redesign your website. 

I wish I had access then to the CMS Made Simple Beginner’s Guide. Written by Sofia Haushildt, published by PACKT Publishing,  available as printed book or ebook or both.
This book will help not only the beginner but also the more experienced CMS Made Simple administrator.

This is the Table of Contents (See the whole table here)

Chapter 1: Building Websites with CMS Made Simple
Chapter 2: Getting Started
Chapter 3: Creating Pages and Navigation
Chapter 4: Design and Layout
Chapter 5: Using Core Modules
Chapter 6: Users and Permissions
Chapter 7: Using Third-party Modules
Chapter 8: Creating Your Own Functionality
Chapter 9: E-commerce Workshop
Chapter 10: Advanced Use of CMS Made Simple
Chapter 11: Administration and Troubleshooting

You can see a lot is covered in this book. See here a Sample chapter. In a pleasant and readable style. The author is a wellknown expert in the CMS Made Simple world.  The book is Recommended! And by buying the book the CMS Made Simple team gets a percentage, so you help further development!

29 April 2010
Toward a science of simplicity: George Whitesides on TED.com

Interesting lecture on a favorite subject.

Got myself an excellent book on the Art of Simplicity. Niklaus Wirth designed programming langauages like Pascal and sequels like Modula-2 and Oberon.  His style and dedication to simplicity in a clear writing and presentation style made a great impression on me.

This book gives unique insites in what has happened and is still happening in the school of Niklaus Wirth. Excellent book!

From the book’s advertisement: 

Niklaus Wirth is one of the great pioneers of computer technology and winner of the ACM’s A.M. Turing Award, the most prestigious award in computer science. he has made substantial contributions to the development of programming languages, compiler construction, programming methodology, and hardware design. While working at ERH Zurich, he developed the languages Pascal and Modula-2. He also designed an early high performance workstation, the Personal Computer Lilith, and most recently the language and operating system Oberon.
While Wirth has often been praised for his excellent work as a language designer and engineer, he is also an outstanding educator, something for which he is not as well known. This book brings together prominent computer scientists to describe Wirth’s contributions to education. With the exception of some of his colleagues such as Professors Dijkstra, Hoare, and Rechenberg, all of the contributors to this book are students of Wirth. The essays provide a wide range of contemporary views on modern programming practice and also illuminate the one persistent and pervasive quality found in all his work: his unequivocal demand for simple solutions. The authors and editors hope to pass on their enthusiasm for simple engineering solutions along with their feeling for a man to whom they are all so indebted.

On the blog of Dominiek, a friend of my son, I found a reference to Getting Real, a book by 37signals, a company producing web-apps. Their motto is:

‘How To Write Vigorous Software

Our modus operandi
We believe software is too complex. Too many features, too many buttons, too much to learn. Our products do less than the competition — intentionally. We build products that work smarter, feel better, allow you to do things your way, and are easier to use.

Underdo your competition
Conventional wisdom says that to beat your competitors you need to one-up them. If they have four features, you need five (or 15, or 25). If they’re spending x, you need to spend xx. If they have 20, you need 30.

This sort of one-upping Cold War mentality is a dead-end. It’s an expensive, defensive, and paranoid way of building products. Defensive, paranoid companies can’t think ahead, they can only think behind. They don’t lead, they follow.

If you want to build a company that follows, you might as well put down this book now.

So what to do then? The answer is less. Do less than your competitors to beat them. Solve the simple problems and leave the hairy, difficult, nasty problems to everyone else. Instead of oneupping, try one-downing. Instead of outdoing, try underdoing.

We’ll cover the concept of less throughout this book, but for starters, less means:

• Less features
• Less options/preferences
• Less people and corporate structure
• Less meetings and abstractions
• Less promises’

In the Getting Real they quote from a rather old, but still valid textbook on writing in english:

Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all sentences short or avoid all detail and treat subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.

—From “The Elements of Style” by William Strunk Jr 

Both books are recommended reading, supporting my views on simplicity! And they are online!

I try to live by the rule that things must be simple. Complicated things are obvious in need of more thought.

Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem

It all started with William of Occam (aka Ockham), the 14th?century English philosopher who wrote this in latin, which literally means , ‘entities are not to be multiplied more than necessary’. This principle, known as Occam’s razor, implies that all other things being equal, the explanation that involves inventing the fewest new concepts is always to be preferred.

Simplicity is not about deficiency, It takes a lot of effort to produce elegant and simple solutions for complicated problems. There’s Albert Einstein’s dictum: ‘Make it as simple as possible, but not simpler’, a health warning against cutting your own throat with Occam’s razor ?simplification isn’t the same as skimping.

Tony (C.A.R.) Hoare, whom I met in 1980 during a lecture he gave in Utrecht, together with Niklaus Wirth and Edsgar Dijkstra, heroes of structured programming, once made this mordant comment on the state of the programming art: ‘There are two ways of constructing a software design: one way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies.’

A lesson about cutting away instead of adding is given by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, best known for writing The Little Prince, but he was also a pioneering aviator and aircraft designer. He said: ‘A designer knows that he has arrived at perfection not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away.’

A book that opened my eyes and made me a fan of Niklaus Wirth and his programming languages, because it described in such clear and simple way the art of programming is ‘Algorythms + Data = Programs”. The title alone is such a simple message! Elegance, structure, step by step decomposing a problem until the final simple solution is found, those weapons are given to us by Wirth. His programming languages and operating systems went from clean Pascal to practical Modula to the minimal but so powerfull Oberon system. Pity the programming world went to simplicity disasters like C and C++.

Blaise Pascal (or Goethe according to other sources) is known for: ‘I have made this letter longer than usual, because I lack the time to make it short.’ writing short pieces, to bring a clear message across, is far more demanding than writing long ones.

The management summary of a report is the hardest part to write, may take more time than the appendices, and, with the current attention span of management of one page, often all that is read. One of my colleagues produces reports and emails that nobody can nor wants to understand. And because management prefers stupidity and complexity above simplicity he gets away with it!

The simple things in life are worth the most!