Pixie - The Small, Simple, Site Maker

Pixie is not out to compete with any other site management tool. Our main goal is to keep Pixie so simple that even your Grandma could use it. But keeping Pixie simple doesn't stop it from having plenty of powerful, useful features. So lets start with our favourite three:

The Top Three

The Installer

Most website management tools will install the same package for everyone. Pixie takes a new approach and allows you to select the type of site you are after. A blog?, A site for your band? Maybe one to run your Business? We think it's your site - so you choose what best suits you. As Pixie matures so will the list of possibilities...

Web Standards

Pixie uses the latest web standards so whatever site you build, it's accessible to all your visitors and is search engine friendly. Pixie is especially fond of Microformats. It's not just your visitors who benefit though. We're working hard to make the site administration area easy and accessible too.

Design

Pixie itself has been designed to be simple. Pixie’s interface has been refined over a number of versions to be user friendly. On the visitor side... you will love the fact that all you need to know is CSS to customise your site. If that sounds too complicated you can choose from the ever increasing amount of free themes.

The Complete Features List

Clean URLs

Ugly dynamic URLs are a thing of the past, Pixie supports clean, search engine friendly URLs.

CSS themes

Pixie currently uses CSS for its templates. So you think that's restrictive? Take a look at CSS Zen Garden for inspiration to see just how powerful CSS can be. For a quick site refresh why not download extra themes available from the Pixie site.

Database backups

Your site data is important, so we figured it would be a good idea to maybe back it up once in a while. Pixie offers support for this to help protect against any unplanned incidents.

File manager with tag support

Upload your files into Pixie and tag them for easy sorting.

Free & Open Source

Pixie is free (as in: it costs you nothing ) and free (as in: you can do whatever you like with it). Pixie is released under GNU General Public License v3.

jQuery

I used to hate programming JavaScript... until I met jQuery. We bundle the latest version of jQuery with Pixie so you can make use of it in your own site. Visit the jQuery site for inspiration and documentation.

Microformats

From the Microformats website: Designed for humans first and machines second, microformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards. Microformats will change the way we use the web!

Modules, Themes, Plug-ins and Blocks

Make Pixie do more with downloadable extras. Browse the ever increasing extras section on the Pixie website.

Multilingual

Pixie has support for different languages.

No limits

Pixie does not impose any limits on your site, you can have as many pages, files, posts and users as you require. It's only as big as your imagination.

Portable

Run Pixie from your local machine or memory pen and use it as a design / development tool. I often make static sites using Pixie and just save the rendered HTML pages from the browser.

Quick to develop for

So you want Pixie to do more? Then its time to program your own module or plug-in. Pixie makes this easy by looking at the database tables for your module and automatically creating the admin interface for it. All you need to code is what he public see. Details are in the documentation.

Robots.txt

Pixie protects certain folders with a robots file, this should help prevent your files and images showing up in web searches and then subsequently being hot-linked. It is one less thing to worry about.

RSS 2.0

Let visitors subscribe to the blogs and news pages you create via RSS. Pixie also has RSS feeds available for keeping an eye on your site (look for the subscribe button on the Pixie dashboard). You can also generate RSS feeds for your blogs comments using a hAtom to RSS script.

Search Engine Friendly

Pixie and Google are "super best friends". We have built Pixie to ensure that search engines find it easy to crawl your sites pages and extract the content they need to give it the best possible ranking.

Sitemap.xml

All the major search engines are now looking for a sitemap.xml file. Pixie supplies one as standard so you don’t have to worry about yet another standard.

Small

Pixie is just a under 1 megabyte in size (all zipped up). We always wanted to keep the size of the software small so it could run quietly and efficiently on your server.

Spam Protected

We all hate spam... and so does Pixie. Pixes uses the excellent Bad Behaviour script to keep your site Spam free.

System and referral logs

Keep track of Pixie and your latest visitors with Pixie’s built in stats system.

User support with privileges

Need help managing your site? You can add more users, give them different privileges and allow them to perform different tasks.

Web Based

You can install Pixie on your own server so you have full control over your own site and data. Pixie will work through most major browsers (we recommend Firefox) giving you control over your site from anywhere in the world.

XHTML compatible rich text editor

That sounds posh!... and it is. Pixie uses TinyMce to add a simple word processing interface text areas... it makes editing your text simple and familiar.

If you have questions or comments about this page head to the Pixie forums.