Freeform - Summary

This group is not part of the GNU Project.

Freeform differs from existing CMS packages in four main ways:

1) Simple access to Multimedia

From being able to crop and scale uploaded photographs, to previewing movies as animated GIFs, tagging and displaying metadata for uploaded media to creating radio or video streams from live and archived content, or even simply offering a PDF of a text article with photo, Freeform supports multimedia like no other CMS available.


2) It's CPU friendly

One of the greatest faults of most CMS packages available is their design requires either regeneration of pages for each pageview or creates unnessesary delay in showing updated content because of a transparent web cache such as Squid.

Pages are viewed many times more often than they're modified, so why does each pageview need to be generated from templates and database content?  We see this as highly inefficient.

So Freeform generates static pages for frequently viewed content only when they are changed, while offering dynamic viewing of lesser-viewed content, creating a near-optimal balence of CPU and disk utilization. 


3) Supports both distributed and peer to peer systems

Freeform includes support for multiple servers, RSS, GNUNet, Tor, and IceShare to both reduce the hosting costs for multimedia and provide
overall reliability for a website despite the state of any one server.

This is especially important for multimedia, where hosting costs can easily overwhelm the budget for an independent group.

In recent years many governments and corporations have attempted to censor online content by shutting down a server or arresting it's maintainers, but by utilizing all of the functionality offered by Freeform and strategically establishing live mirrors in different countries, content can be made agressivly persistant through a network of servers and peer-hosted content, and thus be made nearly impossible for any one government or corporation to censor.


4) It's both Free Software and Patent-Clear

While some CMS packages are licensed under free software licenses, very few with the features similar to Freeform are patent-clear.  It's often forgotten by these authors that software patents are a great threat to the free software community, and to the freedoms offered to their users, and thus we should not encourage the use of patented formats or codecs in our work.

Freeform's multimedia system is built entirely on Ogg, a multimedia streaming container with several patent-clear codecs, and through design and default documentation we actively encourage it's use.  Site maintainers can even choose to disallow unsupported (non-Ogg) media formats and patent-encumbered codecs to further encourage Ogg's use.

Registration Date: Wed 10 Apr 2002 10:25:44 PM UTC
License: GNU General Public License v2 or later
Development Status: 4 - Beta