e107 is a content management system written in PHP and using the popular open source MySQL database system for content storage. It's completely free, totally customisable and in constant development.

e107 uses themes to divide the screen or window into several areas often called panes. The main area is the content pane. You are reading text in the content area.

Around the content pane are located eye candy such as menus, information panels, icons, logos, pictures and applications such as search and calendars. In e107 these are simply called areas... actually menu_areas. The number of menu_areas is defined by the theme and there can be from zero to 9 areas.

The menus tool handles placing items into the menu_areas. Many of these items are not your typical menu. There is a calendar menu, a login menu, a search menu. Basically any function whose output is small enough to fit in a menu_area can be coded as a menu. These mini applications are called plugins because they can be pluged into and removed from e107 easily.

The content pane is filled by creating custom pages or using special plugins.

Eventually everything with e107 should be a plugin, however there are some builtin functions that are handled differently.