Show HN: Pagekit – A new, modern CMS built with Symfony components | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Pagekit – A new, modern CMS built with Symfony components

pagekit.com

95 pointsHeyOlivia60 comments

I've been looking forward to someone publishing a new CMS. WordPress is great, but I've been wanting something new and fresh. I got the alpha installed and it looks good but there is still work to do, but I like what I see. Keep it up!

I'm wondering if it could be possible to rewrite WordPress using modern PHP Aires approaches and keep some kind of Finnmark compatibility layer with its plugins temporarily until they get updated to the new APIs. Will be a lot of work but for a project this popular it might be worth it.

My neighbor is the guy behind this one that's fairly new on the scene: https://buildwithcraft.com/

If you're into shiny new things, I'd recommend Keystone:

http://keystonejs.com/

"Node.js CMS and web application platform built on Express and MongoDB."

It's a pain to get going on a Windows machine, but I got it working on my Linux box inside of 10 minutes. If you're on a Mac, its probably about the same time to get up and running.

It also uses Jade for templates along with Markdown.

Personally, after using Keystone a couple times, I've found it to be more analogous to something like Django or Drupal; it's more of a content management system framework.

Nevertheless, it's a great tool.

The guys at Thinkmill recently did an amazing presentation at SydJS where they released the full source to a Keystone app project. Should be a great place for anyone starting out.

http://www.sydjs.com/showbag

Big thanks to @bladey who put a lot of it together!

I've used the Kunstmaan CMS a few times, also very easy to use. Also built with bundles (Symfony2). http://bundles.kunstmaan.be

Try OctoberCMS, ProcessWire, or CouchCMS.

There are some new CSM's out there that are growing at an amazing rate. I have been a part of the craft cms[0] community since beta and now they have their own stack overflow (stack exchange) site which was the fastest any stack exchange site has ever been put into production from user voting and participation.

I encourage everyone to check it out.

[0] http://buildwithcraft.com

We just switched to Statamic and could not be happier. We modified it a bit so that our staging server has the admin panel enabled while still being backed by a git repo. Every save action commits and pushes to master, giving our non-technical folks a super convenient way to see their changes immediately without making a fatal mistake in production. Devs can then merge into prod after a quick review of the final changes.

Our design and workflow were largely inspired by the Asana team (http://eng.asana.com/2014/02/scaling-asana-com/) but we wanted to give our folks a fully featured admin panel instead of making them trudge through the Bitbucket/Github interface.

Edit: do not want to rain on the Pagekit parade at all...looks great so far.

http://www.concrete5.org/ is worth checking out

With the explosions of frameworks lately, it's refreshing to see that people are still working on CMSs. It's interesting, though, why they made their own templating language rather than use an existing one (twig, for example, is used by OctoberCMS and there's even a Wordpress plugin.)

Also in terms of clients, it'd probably be useful to have a wysiwyg editor or even just editable sub-fields that you can set for each page. Right now there's no clear-cut advantage for using this over, say, a static-page generator (except for the ORM, I guess).

It looks (and sounds) like the [Razor](http://www.asp.net/web-pages/tutorials/basics/2-introduction...) template engine for asp.net, so maybe somebody there liked it? (because there's no way they think their target market has experience with that engine...)

Just an option, but I built a CMS system[1] that actually generates static websites that comes with options for WYSIWYG or markdown. It's node powered, but if you're a php coder it might not be what you want, but we do use the Swig template language (based off twig, based off django...etc). The biggest thing really is that it stores all it's data in a firebase, so the actual CMS is realtime even if the website is compiled staticly.

We're launching later this week, but I can sneak you in early if you'd like. Just send an email to dave@webhook.com

[1] http://www.webhook.com

Razr is largely inspired by the Razor view engine for ASP.NET. Twig is nice and looks to be inspired by Ruby syntax, something I'm a little more familiar with in using Octopress. Perhaps they wanted to introduce a templating engine that was a little more familiar with someone coming from ASP.NET? I can only really speculate as no definitive reason was given.

Writing their own templating engine is definitely an interesting choice and one that follows the razor syntax makes it even more interesting indeed.

Twig syntax takes from Django/Jinja [1], not Ruby.

[1] http://fabien.potencier.org/article/34/templating-engines-in...

This choice is weird for a product based on Symfony, which, by default, includes the Twig engine. It means that it requires every Symfony dev (this CMS target) to maintain (at least) their brain plugged on two template engines..

Maybe the OP could explain?

A little background on the folks who make PageKit: Yootheme is one of the top-3 WordPress theme developers on the market, and they also support other CMS's. They started with Joomla and after developing their own front-end theme framework, they added support for WordPress as well. You could use the same themes across multiple CMS installs - so if you work with their themes it allowed you to be pretty flexible.

After building themes for years, now they have set out to create the CMS they actually want to be using every day, the CMS that doesn't fight back when you need to skin it, and one that lets you do what you need without trying to 'hide' all the settings and options deep inside menus.

I downloaded the alpha and tested it out and I'm thrilled at what I see. I can't wait for this to mature and blossom into a usable product, and with Yootheme behind it I know for sure there will be gorgeous themes available for it! I'm really looking forward to how they solved my pain points working with WordPress, the more I see the more excited I get about this project :)

Just a note — when trying to register an account the form rejects my email, but got an activation email after 1-2 minutes anyway. Which also, out of sheer confusion led me to probably double-register under different usernames and multiple email-addresses.

Edit: but other than that — looks promising. Will keep an eye on it.

Same happened here

It looks like the form is ajaxing out when you press enter. No 'loading' text or other display and no redirect so browser doesn't indicate it's working.

Awesome project, being a PHP developer, I was waiting for someone to launch something that could take some share away from Wordpress. I dig Ghost, and their initiative, but I was not thrilled with it going on Node.js as it'll not be adapted by Wordpress users.

There are so many other CMS's... some of which are better than wordpress (for certain people / certain workflows / certain tasks).

I'm a huge fan of Concrete5 (http://concrete5.org) for small- to medium- sized informational sites. Relatively easy to theme, somewhat easy to develop against, and by far the easiest page editing interface for non-technical end-users (it's all done on the front-end, not in the dashboard).

ProcessWire (http://processwire.com) is also one that looks really good -- stays completely out of your way in terms of the markup, and is a very rational system that is built up from very simple conceptual building blocks to give you the flexibility to build whatever kind of site you need to.

If "take some share away from wordpress" is what you're after (as opposed to "a CMS that is better than wordpress for my own needs), perhaps OctoberCMS (http://octobercms.com/) is the ticket? It was recently launched and appears to have a lot of momentum behind it and a great community around it (probably because it's based on the Laravel framework, which also has a lot of momentum and a great community around it).

Someone else mentioned CraftCMS as well, although that's not free/open source.

Not to mention the copious static site generators that are popular right now (although asking non-technical customers to edit text files on a server is not feasible, so those are mostly for developer or product sites in my opinion).

Best of luck!

I've been fairly happy with Concrete5 as well.

Yes, I have been keeping an eye on October CMS, it looks promising. Laravel is a great framework (I use it too, outside of my own).

Try CouchCMS, easily attach any HTML theme to it.

BTW, the tutorial is very complete, you end up making a job application form, damn!

I incorrectly assumed from the marketing page that this was a hosted CMS. It wasn't until after sign-up it became clear this was a self-hosted build. Why do I need to sign-up when it's available on github?

Looks interesting and I will most likely give it try but when I think of a "modern" cms I think more of the approach that prismic.io and contenful are using. Decoupling the backend from the frontend and using RESTful services to tie it together is a more "modern" approach, especially when web apps are considered. I would love to see some opensource cms's that allowed me to use whatever client side framework I choose to build the frontend.

Is pagekit.com built using Pagekit?

Will be watching this project. My first concern though is that Symphony & Doctrine could be an overkill for small sites on shared hosting.

exactly my thought

It's using Symfony components, not the framework. It also is working great on shared hosting.

Drupal is not exactly same, in some instances Symphony + Doctrine is smaller then Drupal.

For those who don't know, the next version of Drupal (Drupal 8) has incorporated components of the Symfony project into the core CMS code.

http://symfony.com/blog/symfony2-meets-drupal-8

It's still called Drupal, but in many ways it is sounding like a new CMS compared to Drupal 7.

My experience with building products with Drupal 6/7 is that it's great if your use case involves staying within the very rigid boundaries of what Drupal canonically does. If you need something custom or if you need highly-performant code, you're better off writing it from the ground up, because otherwise Drupal fights you the whole way.

I think developer flexibility is one reason they are making such big changes in the architecture for Drupal 8.

That said, well-written custom code should outperform CMS code, because the CMS has to carry more overhead to offer flexibility for more people. That's true of any CMS.

In this era of frameworks, I'm glad to see a modern CMS pop up. Props for that.

We really didn't need another templating language though. Especially one that looks nearly identical to the blade templating language. (http://daylerees.com/codebright/blade)

Bug report: "Learn more about Pagekit in the About section." links to a non-existent page.

Thanks, it's fixed now.

You can start working with this CMS right now. I created a new terminal.com container with Pagekit up and running. Check it here: https://terminal.com/tiny/4NEUNXJUy8

I'm going to be in the minority here, but when I hear Pagekit, I think of Apache::PageKit, also known as plain old "PageKit". See http://pagekit.org/

4 redesigns? That seems ...high? Maybe they're just being playful but I wonder what the explanation behind the redesigns was.

*http://pagekit.com/blog

I'm confused of the title compared to the description of Pagekit on the website. Is it supposed to be a CMS or an application framework?

Disappointing not to see an example app's source code. It's the quickest way for developers to get an understanding of it.

I suppose you could go here: https://github.com/pagekit/pagekit the link was kinda hidden but on the website somewhere

Was it essential for this project to use PHP to compete with Wordpress? In other words, does cheap, cheap hosting still imply PHP?

Basically. You can get cheap VPSes but knowing what to do with it still has a high learning curve. An alternative could be docker images with something like orchardup but thats still a little ways out IMHO.

I don't think it was a case of "let's make the next greatest CMS... what language should we choose..?" I suspect it was more like "what can we build to showcase Symfony." So, using PHP is somewhat the point of the project.

But, considering your question more generically as far as if you wanted to write a Wordpress killer must it be written in PHP? I would say that currently the answer is yes. PHP hosting is ubiquitous and you would face an uphill battle if you also had to wait for shared host providers to provide another environment.

It's kinda chicken/egg thing. If customers start requesting Erlang being installed on shared hosting then providers will start offering it. The thing is, most Wordpress customers don't give two shits about what language their CMS is written in. I'd argue that many of them don't even know what language it is written in.

The first thing that caught me was the Snake-inspired logo. Very nice touch.

Looking forward to playing around with the demo.

No matter what username i put in it said "not available

do any of these new school CMS's give a relatively uncluttered/user definable REST api for free for mobile clients? Preferably something self hosted

https://doc.ez.no/display/EZP/eZ+Publish+REST+API

i18n?

Multi-language not yet, but it is on the todo list. At the moment only localization.

I was excited until I got to this:

> Razr Template Engine

Even if you don't like Twig (why wouldn't you?) there are at least a dozen template engines already.

I wonder in what other places did NIH take over?

You can also use Twig as template engine. Not a big deal.

That wasn't really my point. Yet another PHP templating engine is a code smell to me. Or project smell, if you wish.

I'm inclined to agree with adamors, any time a framework says you can plugin any templating engine, it's almost always more of a hassle than not. If you choose a templating engine that is not a first class citizen of the framework, you're often blocked from key features or functionality offered by the framework. Even if a third party library bridges the feature gap, that library often trails development of the framework or ends up unmaintained and outdated.

I also agree that it's disappointing Twig wasn't selected. It's syntax is incredibly common among templating engines so ramp up time for new developers is usually short - and once you get into the more complex features it's pretty dang cool.

Pretty sure Razor is a .NET thing. This looks like the same syntax. The Play framework's Scala based template engine is based on it as well.

There is at least one other popular PHP templating engine based on Razor, called Blade.

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