I met Luka at some small blogger party with a large portions of rare roast beef served along the way. He was a party crusher (a welcomed one, of course) because, imagine, a guy doesn’t even have a blog! Okay, it was soon forgiven (but not forgotten) . . . I knew nothing of him at the time; he did mentioned something about his own CMS system though, with AdSense as the only income. However, a few months later he appeared again as the author of a CSS gallery I’ve already had in my bookmarks, so I’ve decided it’s time for another, more serious chatter.
Congenial just as his last name suggests, Luka Cvrk is yet another 24 years old youngster from Zagreb (Croatia), but nevertheless known as the author of the “lightest” CMS system in the world - sNews. Not only the smallest, sNews CMS is also rated as the best engine in lite CMS category at OpenSourceCMS community. The whole engine comes in a single file sized only 95kBytes, but it is the real McCoy capable of serving literally any type of web site.
He said that he has been involved in specialized web services development for a couple of ventures (the kind we’d like to call Web 2.0), but now he’s entirely devoted to his own projects sNews CMS and CSS Heaven showcase gallery. At the moment, he’s working on new 1.5 version of his CMS, AJAX powered social bookmarking engine and the AJAX forum which will soon be available on Phoorum.com.
Right now, you’re known as the author of the lite CMS system called sNews. Could you tell me some more about it?
sNews is created in June 2005 as a simple news editing script that can be easily adapted according to my customers’ needs. I’ve decided
to
publish it
as an Open
Source application,
and in only
two days it’s been
downloaded a 1000 times - a great motivation for me, I must say. I’ve decided to publish it as an Open Source application, and in only two days it’s been downloaded a 1000 times - a great motivation for me, I must say. Obviously, simplicty of usage and integration is recognized by
end-users, and a strong accent on web standards made it very interesting to web designers as well. Today the sNews is much more advanced thanks to extremely supportive community gathered around sNews Forum and to new Lead Developer Krešimir Mihelec.
Do you know how many web sites uses sNews?
I’m afraid I don’t have the exact data. The general idea was to create CMS system without any (non)commercial limitations what so ever. Therefore, linkback isn’t mandatory, but I agree that it would be the best measurement tool to determine the real usage of my CMS.
My internal stats shows about ten thousand downloads and counting, and that’s only in a first month after each new release. The interesting part is that the same thing happens to my free CSS templates as well.
It took me about twenty minutes to install sNews CMS. More experienced user would do it much faster, but I’ve stuck on MySQL database setup, something I’ve never done before. User manual is available on
sNews website, and is sufficient enough, even for a dummy like me. There’s also a
forum with an extensive FAQ and guidelines on upgrading with some additional options. Admin pane is simple to use, it’s fast and intuitive. It’s really easy to add new categories and there are some advanced customizing features available during text editing. With a
little extra effort, sNews can be easily adapted to fit most of the users’ needs. The look of your site is changeable, and there are numerous ready-to-go templates available as well.
Has the popularity of sNews CMS opened up some new business opportunites? What is your next step?
Of course, there are new opportunities emerging, especially from the companies interested in sNews rebranding and licensing at the local markets. Others have recognized its potential as well - there’s a whole network of websites offering hosting or some other services involved with sNews CMS (such as snews.ca for example).
There are a couple of distributions present so far. For instance, local web development companies are selling their rebranded sNews packages to their clients, and besides, I’ve already been arranging some development projects regardless of sNews itself, but nevertheless it helped me a lot during this process. Regarding my next step, I will continue developing sNews and I’ll try to include others as well. The idea is to connect exsisting sNews powered websites into one multilingual network in a form of localised multiplatform system which will offer customized features. I must admit that I’ve been thinking of commercializing sNews, but I don’t have any plans at
the moment. I must admit that I’ve been thinking of commercializing sNews, but I don’t have any plans at the moment. One thing is for sure though - sNews will remain Open Source.
How do you explain megapopularity of WordPress CMS and are there any relations to sNews?
WordPress is megapopular, and that’s a fact. However, it is less known that Matt Mullenweg had placed 168,000 hidden articles on wordpress.org, and gained important position on Google. Therefore competition is undoubtedly strong, but seems to me that sNews came at the moment when web standard awareness is growing stronger every minute. Users have recognized its simplicity of use and capabilities equal to CMS systems of 4MB or larger. Although sNews dominates in the lite CMS niche, only time can tell about its future in the next few moths when we release new versions.
Have you consider making sNews version for hosting purposes, something like WordPress.com did?
You see, that kind of work requires more time for administration and user support and involves more people than I already have.
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