Work in Progress: doCMS

If you don't have time skip to the features list!

We have been developing our own Content Management System (CMS) for some time now. It started as a self-standing project to manage the content of our website only, but we soon found out that we could use the software on our clients’ websites as well. Many would argue creating a CMS is a waste of time since there are so many readymade high quality CMSs out there available for free. However, the initial reason behind starting this project was to learn and improve our development skills, and to add some core features that we wanted which, for some reason, are not a de facto standard on many systems.

It turns out that doCMS has reached such a reasonable level that we decided to deploy it on two of our client websites and due to this, we are going to put extra effort into developing it further to bring it to the next level.

Since it started from scratch to accommodate our requirements, it supports some features that even for example, WordPress, does not support without plug-ins or similar.

Goals

• Enable our developers to quickly create dynamic – database backed websites – with no restrictions, that enable the user to edit any content. By any we mean ANY, including the admin interface itself.
• Multi language from the core (we are proud of this one!)
• Pretty URLs , always.

*Important note: we are planning on experimenting with this software. Things will change heavily over time and since we do not have a consistent user base we do not have to deal with backwards compatibility. We will take care of updating our clients to the latest version for free.

Technology Stack

• Linux and Windows OS both supported;
• Apache Web Server (we will soon make it work with nginx);
• PHP 5.4.0 or greater (anything below won’t work – we use PHP traits);
• MySQL (any reasonably recent version will do fine).

Features

• Content editing – anything really, including files;
• Multi language support from the core;
• Pretty URLs by default;
• Users and extensible permission system (admins, editors or define your own);
• Simple page caching – really makes a difference when turned on;
• Interface to database (any table) with usual add/edit/delete/search operations;
• Templating system (basic);
• And a few more special ones...

The doCMS is geared to make website development easy for us – and to give full control, in multiple languages, of the website content to our client. We do not know where this project will bring us, but the doCMS will be part of our in-house tool set for many years to come.

If you’re interested in having us design a website for you where you will have full control of editing your website content please contact us for a free consultation.