Quick Take Review: Vivvo Web Content Management

Vivvo is an Web Content Management System based on the popular LAMP stack of technologies. Built by Serbian software house, Spoonlabs, the product is designed to deliver and manage interactive publishing websites.

This PHP-based Web CMS features a modern AJAX-ified user interface, a clean and easy to use backoffice set of tools, and the ability to create your front-end website without having to write a line of code. Come along as we take a closer look under the covers.

A commercially available web content management system built on an open source stack, the Vivvo content management system is targeted at the small publisher who wants an interactive publishing website.

While it doesn't have all the basic functionality you would expect in a content management system — specifically workflow and versioning capabilities are missing — it does provide a clean and easy to use website administration interface, and enables you to create and manage your front-end website without much of a learning curve or much technical skill.

Vivvo also provides the ability to have subscription-based membership sections on your website, a common need for small publishers.

The Basic Story

Company & Product History

The company behind Vivvo CMS is Spoonlabs d.o.o, a privately owned company located in Belgrade, Serbia. Started in 2005, it has nine full time employees and is privately owned and operated. Vivvo CMS is their only product.

The concept of Vivvo was brought to life in 2004 by Spoonlab's founder, Boris Krstovic. A freelance web developer at the time, he wanted a CMS that was simple use, yet modular and powerful, to help him deploy websites for his clients.

The solution — Vivvo CMS — started life as a simple bundle of PHP scripts and has gone through several major evolutions to become the web content management solution it is today. The current version,  recently released, is v4.1.

Market & Pricing

Vivvo is what we at CMSWire would term a "simple web content management system". It is currently suitable for the small business market, primarily targeted to smaller publishing companies who don't have a large number of writers and/or editors. It could be used for blog sites, magazines and online journals, including publishers who want subscription-based capability on their website.

Some of Vivvo's current customer base include websites from across Europe and a few in North America. Examples include:

• PRI- Public Radio International
• The Black Ship: Japan News and Forum
• EuFootball
• SkyUser Radio

There are also licenses targeted towards web design/development studios who want to integrate a content management system into their website designs for their customers (Clover Content CMS has the same type of offering).

Vivvo is a commercially available software product. There are four types of licenses you can purchase, as defined below: 

Depending on the license one selects, you are paying for a level of support (technical and developer) and free add-ons (like plug-ins and themes/templates).

The Developer License enables you to use Vivvo as the underlying CMS for websites you develop for clients as long as the solution is a not a packaged solution you sell to multiple clients. So basically, each solution you develop must be a unique, standalone website.

All four licenses enable you to download the source code and extend it for your use as defined in the license. The license is renewed every year and includes access to the Member section of the Vivvo website where all patches and upgrades are located and access to the support area of the website.

Spoonlabs does plan to release the PHP framework (Vivvo framework and VTE template engine) for public download under the BSD license sometime this year.

Key Features and Ratings

Core Technologies

Vivvo CMS is built on the LAMP stack of open source technologies: Linux, Apache, PHP and MySQL. It is an object oriented solution developed using a MVC (model-viewer-controller) application architecture.

The system runs on the Apache webserver, and although the company claims that it will install on any webserver that supports PHP, they state that it will probably not work properly if run with servers other than Apache.

Additional system requirements include:

• expat - PHP extension for XML parsing
• GD Library - Image manipulation
• PCRE extension - Regular expression library
• Write Access - Ability to write files to the webserver
• SendMail/SMTP - For email notification functionality

Content Entities

The most basic content entity in Vivvo is the article. Each article includes fields such as title, abstract, body, image abstract and caption, and can include images and attachments. Additional metadata includes publishing date, article category, status and author.

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Tags: cms reviews, quick take, reviews, vivvo, vivvo cms, web cms, web publishing

Vivvo is an Web Content Management System based on the popular LAMP stack of technologies. Built by Serbian software house, Spoonlabs, the product is designed to deliver and manage interactive publishing websites.

This PHP-based Web CMS features a modern AJAX-ified user interface, a clean and easy to use backoffice set of tools, and the ability to create your front-end website without having to write a line of code. Come along as we take a closer look under the covers.