Welcome to Speck, a free open-source content management system for ColdFusion. Speck was inspired by Spectra, hence the name, but was designed to be much smaller in scope and cut out lots of the complexity for both developers and users. Speck is...
Stable
Speck is a grandaddy of a CMS. It's pretty stable and has been in active use on various production servers since 2003. It also achieves high performance, handling large numbers of concurrent users when the built-in caching features are used.
Simple to Use
Speck concentrates on the core problem of making it easy for users to manage content and does not come with many enterprise level system management features built-in. There is no admin section, just an admin toolbar. In edit mode, users edit content items from the pages on which they are published, using administration links embedded into the page.
Developer Friendly
Like Spectra, Speck was designed as an object-based content management framework, but not necessarily a complete system out of the box. This means it has a nice neat API to enable developers to rapidly configure and extend the system to meet specific requirements. Things didn't really work out as expected, and now Speck is really a complete CMS out of the box, but with the bonus of retaining that nice API.
Basic development requires the use of just three custom tags - create an app using cf_spApp, add the toolbar to the page using cf_spToolbar and output content where you want it using cf_spContent. Speck creates the database tables and indexes and takes care of the SQL CRUD for you. It also creates a simple admin interface on the fly, so there is rarely any need to code your own forms for managing content. Extending the system and adding your own custom content types is also very simple, have a look at the documentation for more info.
Feature Rich
The core Speck content management system makes very few assumptions about what how you want to use it, but in reality, lots of people just want to make web sites with a sitemap, breadcrumbs, standard user management features and all that jazz, so the standard download also includes what we've called our portal development framework. It breaks pages up into layouts and content templates, has a user interface for managing site sections and users, and adds a few other things like content indexing and tags for rendering breadcrumbs and navigation menus.
Documentation Poor :-(
Usual story isn't it. Although there is quite a bit of documentation for the core system, the portal development framework is basically un-documented. Think of it as bleeding edge Speck, features have a tendancy to migrate from the portal framework into the core of Speck once they've proven themselves worthy. They tend to get documented then too, but until then, use the source.
Platform Independent
Speck requires ColdFusion 5 or later but has been designed to be operating system, database and web server independent and has been tested on Windows and Linux with Access, SQL Server, Oracle, PostgreSQL, MySQL, DB2 and Firebird/Interbase and both IIS and Apache.
Free and Open-Source
Speck is licensed under the Academic Free License version 2.1, a non-copyleft license recommended by the Open Source Initiative.