First of all, this is not a paid review. It’s in preparation for a series of articles, Making Money with Mini Sites, Step by Step, that I’m going to start tomorrow. I will use 19 Pages for this series so I thought I’d review it first so you can see what it can and can’t do.

What it is

19 Pages is a very simple CMS built for fast deployment of mini sites by the guys from 45n5. It’s limited to 20 pages, index plus 19 articles, because that’s how the creators see mini sites, having 20 pages or less.

Here’s the short presentation/tutorial video from 19Pages.

The Good Parts

Simple to install - It doesn’t need a database, because it stores everything in its files. You just unzip the files and upload them to your host, and you’re ready to go. Log in (user: admin, password: admin), change the password (!) and start writing.

Easy to move - its as simple as moving the files from a host to another

Extremely easy to use - you don’t really have that many options to play with. You write the text, add the meta description and keywords and you’re done.

SEO OK for the most part - I would’ve preferred using - instead of _ for url’s but they’re still SE friendly. You probably can modify these in the .htaccess, but I’m not that technical so no idea there. You can add meta description and keywords so that’s covered too. No need to install SEO plugins like you would with WordPress. The only problem in the SEO department is that not all templates are coded well when it comes to the page title. The default version is ok, but the Made Of Cheese template uses the title from the index on all the pages, instead of using the article title. Didn’t check all the templates to see if there are others with this problem. I hope they fix this for the next release.

Until then, click Edit template and then at the top, in the head section, replace the part marked with red

<title><?php echo $sitename;?></title>

with this: $sitetitle;?

The Bad Parts

These are experienced by me with an older version. No idea if they fixed them yet.

  • Deleting the site leaves some sort of traces on the server. I added an index.html and it still kept saying that it couldn’t find the index.php
  • On the domain where I used it I had two directories /blog and /forums. The blog worked fine, but I couldn’t access the forums anymore. It took me to a 404 page of the CMS as far as I can remember.
  • Doesn’t work in folders, only on sub-domains or on the main domain. So test.example.com and example.com work fine, but example.com/test doesn’t work. Shouldn’t be a problem because most people don’t install mini sites in folders. I imagine it doesn’t work there because of the .htaccess file? Not sure.
  • It’s got a limited number of templates to use. They offer custom templates for $49 but that’s too high if you want to have a template fit for a certain niche. If you want a template to use on all your mini sites it might be worth it. If you know how to code I assume you can make one yourself.

Conclusions

All in all, I like it. I like it a lot. It’s supposed to be easy and for mini sites only and it does that well. Extremely easy to use and deploy. I used WordPress for static sites until recently, but I’ll switch to 19Pages for any mini sites I’ll make from now on.

Tomorrow or the day after tomorrow I’ll start the Making Money with Mini Sites, Step by Step series. The first article in the series will be rather long because it will detail every step, so I might not be able to finish it tomorrow.

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