SiteSpindle.com

 Big Medium's alter ego, the Genie logo.

Cross-posted at bonniegibbons.com.

Big Medium is a paid, self-hosted CMS built by Josh Clark of Global Moxie. The license fee of $185 covers unlimited websites on the same server, as long as the program, once installed, has access to every site's root directory. It works well with individual hosting accounts and with reseller hosting accounts -- just install BM on your reseller service domain and give it permission to populate your clients' root directories. I've used it successfully on an H-Sphere reseller account and a CPanel individual and reseller account. BM installs in about half an hour and requires no database. As that fact implies, it creates static pages.

Big Medium is uncommonly user-centered, whether the user is the code-savvy Big Medium administrator or the client who has no idea what CSS stands for and likes it that way.

Templates and Themes

Although BM sometimes uses the word "theme" in its terminology, it's not theme-based a la Wordpress, Nuke, etc. You can't download someone's open-source theme, FTP it into a theme directory, and automagically find that design available for your site. That's both the bad news and the good news. Big Medium works with templates and widgets. There are five attractive, preloaded template sets but the program is really designed for those comfortable with HTML, who want to implement an original design. That said, Big Medium is uncommonly user-centered, whether the user is the code-savvy Big Medium administrator or the client who has no idea what CSS stands for and likes it that way.

Bloggy Feedy Social Media-y Goodies

Big Medium is not blogware. It's a CMS that can blog. It comes with an RSS feed (for every site category if you wish) and this can easily be swapped for Feedburner if that's what you prefer. Social media goodies ("share" buttons, etc.) must be coded into the templates manually.

For this reason, if you just want to blog as an end-user and aren't enthused by HTML and CSS, BM might be overkill. But if you're a developer who finds blogware insufficiently flexible -- but needs to enable clients to maintain their own sites, you might want to consider BM along with comparable products in its price range.

SEO Friendly CMS

It will require additional posts to provide sufficient detail for the SEO community. (Isn't it annoying to see a program touted as SEO-friendly, only to discover that it, say, doesn't let you control a page's URL?)  But for now, some quick hits:

• Every URL is controllable by the user via a "slug name" - by default, it will be a hyphenated version of the page title.
• Every section of the site can have its own RSS feed and its own "News Gadget" (a script provided so that other users can display the most recent pages on their own websites)
• Every page has a meta description and keyword tag.
• Tagging is supported
• BM creates your XML sitemap for you. And, Josh offers a nice robots.txt tutorial specifically for BM
• Every page gets a description for use in "blurbs" throughout the site... and it can be different from the META description.
• Every section or category page can have a shortened name for navigation menus.. different from the URL slug
• Every page can have a full-length display title that's different from the navigation menu name and the URL slug
• URLs incorporate folder/category names - which makes great URLs but risks duplicate URLs when placing the same piece of content into multiple folders. It's pretty easy to create a canonical version through redirecting, but you do this in your hosting account, not in the program.