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Question by Angel W:
PHP CMS and Open Source – Profiting?
I have spent the last year and several months developing a content management in PHP. It technically was completed a long time ago, and I continued to go back and revise it, a few times from the ground up.

I originally intended to use this for personal sites here and there, as most other CMS’ I have used were large, bloated, and very resource intensive ( Joomla for example ). Though I loved Joomla, I just cannot afford to use it anymore with more than one site on VPS hosting.

The CMS I made now is kind of like a mixture between Joomla, WordPress and Drupal; all the ideal rolled into one much smaller package. So far from testing, it runs faster than either of the three listed and has most all the same features. It can be extended with components and plugins very easily ( like Joomla, but much, much easier ), supports SEF out of the box with complete control over URL structure, etc. It has a lot of useful features I did not find in either package as well; resources to create and maintain backups of site settings and database, etc.

I have spent so much time optimizing ( about the last 6 months on optimizing alone ) and page caching. A cached page generates one database query by default, a non cached page generates two ( this is before or after logging in ).

Not to mention, the CMS by default has a lot of Ajaxed features. The admin ( in which you can rename and relocate for security ) has a lot of nice Ajax for managing, adding pages, etc. It also has a forum component that natively integrates with the CMS, which too uses some good Ajax implementation.

So far it runs REALLY good, I am thoroughly impressed with the final product. My question is, since I am in need of money and do not want to sell the script ( it WILL be open source ), what is the ideal way to make a profit from Open Source without making it a commercial product? Do ads like Adsense really do any good? Those interested probably will know exactly what the ads are and definetly will not click them, so how else can you make money from such a product?


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Answer by Parker2334
You could slap a “Donations Welcome” banner across each page.

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