This site is no longer kept up to date, the new Ariadne website is at http://www.ariadne-cms.org/.

Web Application Server and Content Management System

Ariadne is a Web Application Server and Content Management System. written entirely in PHP. It has a rich user interface which includes wizards, pulldown menus, and a WYSIWYG HTML editor (MSIE 4+ only). Ariadne is available for free under the Gnu General Public License.

Take a look at the guided tour of Ariadne.

What is Ariadne?

Ariadne is an Application Platform for the Web, built entirely on Open Source technology.

What this means is that Ariadne is a Content Management System, using a WYSIWYG HTML editor, it's also a Group Calendar, a Photo Album, an Addressbook, a Weblog and anything else you want it to be.

Ariadne was built with PHP, the most popular web programming language, Apache, the most popular web server, and MySQL, the most popular database engine for web applications. PostgrSQL is also supported. All these are Free Software, as is Ariadne.

Because Ariadne is completely free, you can download it, use it, even change it to your own needs or build new applications on top of it.

Ariadne gives you all the tools you need to easily build a new website, an intranet or even an e-commerce system. You can build and manage all this simply with your webbrowser.

What does Ariadne do?

When you create a website with Ariadne, it stores all your content, templates, files, etc. in a structured object store built on top of a database system, e.g. MySQL. This object store looks a lot like a normal file system, like your operating system uses. You can create directories and files and navigate through them with the Ariadne explorer just like a normal filesystem. But this filesystem can do a lot more.

Ariadne allows you to seperate the content, layout and logic of your website or internet application. You can assign different people to manage these parts. Ariadne will combine all these parts dynamically when someone visits a webpage.

The Store contains all the information for the website. This information is combined with the class descriptions to create Objects. These objects contain not only the information, but also contain operations (methods) that can work on this information and on the Store. Ariadne then applies the user defined templates on these objects to generate a webpage.

Objects stored in the the Ariadne Store are exactly that, Objects. So you can have all the advantages of Object Oriented Programming when building your website or application. Including inheritance and polymorphy on everything you put in the Store. Templates defined for a specific Class of objects will be inherited in sub-classes or can be overridden with new templates. Templates also automaticcaly extend down the 'filesystem' tree.

Templates can be defined by users  through the web, via the management interface of Ariadne. Templates can be any kind of text type: html, xml, rtf, etc. Information and special operations on the Ariadne store can be used in a template, via a scripting language 'PINP', which consists of a subset of PHP functions. Besides that each class also defines extra functions, which can be used in templates assigned to objects of that class.

All this allows you to create a web application or website with a minimum of programming while keeping the content and layout seperate.

So how do I get started?

First get Ariadne. You can download it from this website. Install it using the installation instructions that come with it. Then go to the tutorials section on this website and follow these tutorials step by step.

If you come upon any problems during or after this, you can always ask on the ariadne support  newsgroups  or mailing lists.

If you are interested in professional Ariadne support or a complete Ariadne hosting solution, take a look at Muze's services options, or e-mail info@muze.nl.