MeshCMS is an online editing system written in Java. It provides a set of features usually included in a CMS, but it uses a more traditional approach: pages are stored in regular HTML files and all additional features are file-based, without needing a database.

MeshCMS has been thought as a quick tool to edit pages online, manage files and create some common components like menus, breadcrumbs, mail forms, image galleries and so on. It requires few resources: the default 64MB heap is enough to host a dozen of sites.

Main features are:

The English part of my blog is mainly technical. If you can read Italian, check the Italian section for articles of other kind.

MeshCMS requires an application server compatible with the Servlet 2.3 and JSP 1.2 specifications. Some examples of such a server are Tomcat and Jetty.

Pages can be edited with Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 or higher, Firefox and Opera 9, with JavaScript and cookies enabled. Other browsers might be compatible, but are not tested. Note that you might need to allow popups from the site being edited, otherwise you won't be able to use the File Browser from within the editor.

Click on the image below to get the latest version of MeshCMS (download provided by SourceForge):

I use a VMWare virtual machine to run my favorite software anywhere. It is a very nice solution, nevertheless when I run it at home I feel quite frustrated for not being able to run it on real hardware.

The easiest solution is to mount it as a local drive and access files from a real Linux installation. VMWare server provides a tool to mount vmdk files, but I don't want to install it just to be able to use that command.

Fortunately, I'm using a flat VMWare image, and this makes possibile to mount the image vithout any special tool. After all, the flat vmdk file is just a raw image of the disk, so you just need to…