GetSimple Themes

You install themes in GetSimple just like in Bludit. Download the theme, unzip it, and transfer the contents of the folder to the /theme/ directory on the server. Then enable the new theme on the Theme tab of the GetSimple back end.

Components are one special feature of GetSimple themes. For example, the standard Innovation theme has the Sidebar component. The sidebar of the sample page only contains some information on the CMS's functions. To customize the content, click the Edit Components button below Choose Theme on the right and edit the text in the large Sidebar input field. The Innovation theme also lets you display or insert social media links via the Theme | Innovation Theme Settings tab.

GetSimple Plugins

In GetSimple's add-ons repository [7], you can find many useful plugins. For example, MonsterGallery and I18N Gallery (Figure 7) are two recommended plugins for photo galleries. Many of the available extensions indicate that they only work with GetSimple up to version 3.1 or 3.2. However, this is misleading and seems to mean only that they have not yet been officially released for version 3.3. A test with some of these plugins, such as the Multi User plugin, showed that they also work smoothly with the latest version of GetSimple. This also seems to apply to theme compatibility.

Figure 7: The I18N Gallery plugin lets you create image captions and descriptions for your photo gallery.

Conclusions

Bludit and GetSimple CMS are intuitive programs that are especially recommended for beginners and smaller websites. Although the user interface designs differ, major parts of the feature set are virtually identical. GetSimple has the edge here, mainly because of its many useful extensions.

Bludit's biggest advantage is the superbly designed themes. Although there is no usable gallery plugin available for Bludit, I found it easier to design a photo or portfolio website with Bludit than with GetSimple in testing, because Bludit offers a suitable theme.

Having said this, GetSimple is better suited for most other use cases, such as for smaller companies or projects. GetSimple does require some willingness on the part of the site operator to delve deeper into the topic of web design and template or theme customization. Surprisingly, GetSimple does not come with usable visitor statistics. There is a plugin, but it requires Matomo or Piwik. And this, in turn, means setting up a database, which undermines the idea of a flat-file CMS.