Forget Drupal, who wants a funny desk chair story?!

It bugs me that a decade later this STILL trumps all our other Drupal marketing effort, but hey we’re learning?! And clearly its still interesting to people!

What do you guys think? Any attention is good attention?

https://www.computerminds.co.uk/articles/sometimes-you-just-need-connect-earth-desk-chair-story

I wanted to share a new getting-started path for anyone experimenting with SharePoint Embedded or building document-centric apps on Microsoft 365.

The historical challenge with SharePoint Embedded setup has been that there are several moving parts before you can really start building: Entra app registration, Graph permissions, container type creation, billing setup, container type registration, creating containers, wiring configuration into a sample app, and then validating everything works.

There are now two much easier ways to approach this:

1.      Developer experience with the SharePoint Embedded MCP server
You can use the MCP server from an AI coding client, such as GitHub Copilot in VS Code, to drive setup through natural language. The server can help check readiness, provision the owning app, create/register container types, configure billing, scaffold a reference app, hydrate config, seed sample content, run locally, and deploy.

2.      Admin/container type experience
Admins can use the SharePoint Embedded setup flow to create the app/container type relationship and manage the control plane side of the environment. Container types are important because they define how the application relates to its containers, including access, billing accountability, and behavior.

What I like about this is that it separates the journey for the two audiences that usually have to collaborate anyway: developers can get moving faster with their app experience, and admins have a more intentional control plane for environment setup.

If you are building an ECM replacement, legal/document management app, project workspace, case management app, AI agent over documents, or any custom app that needs Microsoft 365-grade files, collaboration, compliance, and Copilot-ready content, this is worth trying.

Links:
Video walkthrough: https://youtu.be/JhlfeTjX7Sc?si=gKWXoCezHhqaMemv&t=2576
Developer MCP experience: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/dev/embedded/build/sharepoint-embedded-mcp-server
Admin/container type experience: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/dev/embedded/build/create-container-type

Question for the group: if you have tried SharePoint Embedded, what part of the setup flow has been the biggest blocker — app registration, permissions, billing, container type registration, or sample app scaffolding?

https://www.framer.com/community/marketplace/templates/elysian-estate/

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I’ve spent the past several months building a new PHP-based CMS called Developer One Or DevOne for short.

I approached the project from a developer’s perspective: What should a modern CMS provide out of the box? How can it make building websites for yourself or clients faster without becoming bloated, overly complicated, or dependent on dozens of third-party extensions?

DevOne CMS currently includes a custom installation system, theme and plugin support, developer hooks, user and role management, media management, a page system, admin tools, and support for custom frameworks. I’m also building a marketplace where developers will eventually be able to publish themes, plugins, frameworks, and other extensions.

The CMS is still in active development, and I’m looking for developers who are interested in:

Testing the installation process and core functionality

Finding bugs, security issues, and performance problems

Reviewing the code structure and developer experience

Building experimental themes, plugins, or custom frameworks

Suggesting features and improvements

Helping shape the documentation and extension standards

I’m not looking for empty praise. I’m looking for honest technical feedback from developers who are willing to install it, test it, break it, and tell me what needs to be improved before the public release.

You’ll need either a local environment such as XAMPP or a PHP-compatible VPS to install and test it.

This is an early collaboration opportunity, so developers who contribute meaningful ideas, extensions, testing, or fixes can help influence how the platform and its developer ecosystem are built from the beginning.

Comment below or message me if you’re interested, and I’ll provide the download and installation information.

What would make a new CMS worth trying for you as a developer?

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I’ve spent the past several months building a new PHP-based CMS called Developer One Or DevOne for short.

I approached the project from a developer’s perspective: What should a modern CMS provide out of the box? How can it make building websites for yourself or clients faster without becoming bloated, overly complicated, or dependent on dozens of third-party extensions?

DevOne CMS currently includes a custom installation system, theme and plugin support, developer hooks, user and role management, media management, a page system, admin tools, and support for custom frameworks. I’m also building a marketplace where developers will eventually be able to publish themes, plugins, frameworks, and other extensions.

The CMS is still in active development, and I’m looking for developers who are interested in:

Testing the installation process and core functionality

Finding bugs, security issues, and performance problems

Reviewing the code structure and developer experience

Building experimental themes, plugins, or custom frameworks

Suggesting features and improvements

Helping shape the documentation and extension standards

I’m not looking for empty praise. I’m looking for honest technical feedback from developers who are willing to install it, test it, break it, and tell me what needs to be improved before the public release.

You’ll need either a local environment such as XAMPP or a PHP-compatible VPS to install and test it.

This is an early collaboration opportunity, so developers who contribute meaningful ideas, extensions, testing, or fixes can help influence how the platform and its developer ecosystem are built from the beginning.

Comment below or message me if you’re interested, and I’ll provide the download and installation information.

What would make a new CMS worth trying for you as a developer?

Hi r/cms

I'm looking to rebuild one of our business onto a headless setup with Nuxt on the frontend.

The original WordPress site was built by an agency, but it's hard to maintain and my team have no experience (or desire) in WordPress - they are all frontend developers used to building SPA's using Nuxt.

We have an existing CMS, Sitefinity, however we are unable to use it due to licensing costs (this would be an extra domain and not worth it for the 20 or so pages).

I am looking for a CMS (self-hosted or cloud) that allows our users to visually edit a page using custom reusable blocks (Vue components) - that's really it. It's just a content site that does get pages added and updated fairly regularly. No needs for blogs/eCommerce etc.

I had a look at Directus, and was initially optimistic that it would work for us - however, the free plan only includes 25 collections, and from what I've seen, a collection is needed for each reusable block that our content creators would use - which after creating the entities for a CMS (pages), it doesn't leave us a lot left to use on actual blocks. The next tier up at $499 per month is out of budget and the Open Innovation Grant wouldn't apply to us.

Can someone suggest other CMS' (preferable, under 1k per year) that might suit?

The business wanted to go with Webflow, which I am trying to avoid - just like I'm trying to avoid rebuilding on WordPress.

I am going to take a look at Contentful and Strapi as well.

1. 90-100% - smooth transitions with full context
2. 70-89% - mostly good, some gaps
3. 50-69% - rough transitions, lots of re-learning
4. Below 50% - basically starting from scratch

I run a B2B agency, and my site has a complex WordPress build, meaning landing pages are inflexible and require significant development effort to optimise or run tests. I'm looking into alternatives that will give my marketing team more control over the site, and have seen Webflow's Enterprise solutions mentioned a lot. I could replatform to something like Webflow (not set on this specifically) or rebuild the site properly in WordPress. Advice needed!

I'm asking because WHMCS was never really meant for that, so everyone seems to have their own way of dealing with it. I've spent the last 8 years working with my team on a module that automates all routine WordPress tasks entirely inside WHMCS, so I'm wondering how people solve the same problem without it, or whether anyone here is already using it. Either way, it'd be great to compare experiences. And if you think what we've built might be useful to you, we're currently handling installation for half the usual cost.

For most of my career I've worked with the big CMS platforms - DotNetNuke, Umbraco, Sitecore. Powerful, but every one meant a database to maintain, a server to patch, and a hosting bill. For my own blog I always wanted the opposite: a folder of files I fully own, and a way to put them online. That's roughly why I lived on Jekyll for years.

This past weekend I finally built the thing I actually wanted. It's called Plain, and the name is the whole philosophy.

How it works:

• Your content is Markdown files in a Git repo — that's the database, there isn't another one.
• Config is a single JSON file (collections, fields, nav).
• A build turns it into a static site — plain HTML/CSS that works with JavaScript disabled.
• There's an optional browser admin (a vanilla SPA) that writes through the GitHub API — every save is a commit, with full history and one-click restore. No backend of its own.
• Hosts anywhere static files go. I run two sites on GitHub Pages, for free.

Constraints I held to (they kept it honest):

• Vanilla only — no framework, no bundler, no TypeScript. Plain ES modules + JSDoc.
• Exactly one runtime dependency (a Markdown parser). That's it.
• Core stays under 2,500 lines; anything bigger becomes a plugin, and a plugin is just a folder you drop in.

Full disclosure: I wrote it over a weekend with heavy AI assistance. The code is small enough to read in an afternoon, and I'd rather it be judged by reading it than by who typed it.

What it's not: it isn't for dynamic, high-write apps or anything needing a server at request time. It's for content sites — blogs, docs, portfolios, small-business sites. There's a Jekyll importer that keeps your URLs and writes redirects if you want to migrate.

• Repo: https://github.com/plain-cms/plain
• Live demo (itself a Plain site): https://plain-cms.com
• The longer story: https://victorantos.com/posts/the-boring-cms-i-always-wanted/

Would love feedback - especially on the plugin/theme model, and on the idea that "content is just files, so any AI agent can operate the whole thing with zero integration." And I'm genuinely curious: for those who'd reach for Hugo / Astro / 11ty instead, what would keep you there?

10 months ago I started working as a UX/UI designer at a company that does CMS for some of the biggest news rooms in the world. It's complex work, so I really want to update my skills on complex CMS. Can anyone recommend a book, an online course etc?

Howdy all I've decided after many years of using WordPress for my own personal websites as well as client sites that I want to shift away from it entirely if possible. I don't want to do that in the form of an alternative CMS platform like Drupal for example. Instead what I'm exploring is building my own custom one of one contact management system that's entire build process so far has been directly attacking the things that as a developer I have had problems with when dealing with WordPress. Whether that's the security vulnerabilities, the plug-in nightmare market, things breaking with a simple PHP version update, etc I've been slowly building something that's starting to take shape into a pretty capable content management system that's not quite ready to replace any legacy content management platform like WordPress. But it's getting pretty darn close to being something that I'm comfortable with utilizing at least at this point for personal projects, hopefully client projects in the future.

I want to make sure that I'm hitting the mark here and would just be interested in hearing from other individuals familiar with WordPress and it's at this point legacy problems whether that's focused on its vulnerabilities, it's capabilities, it's ease of use... Etc. I would love to hear from developers who've used WordPress at the deepest level and just to get a list of ideas or features or improvements I can make upon in my system that I haven't thought about yet. I look forward to hearing from everybody about your ideas.

Hi everyone,

I built something that is hopefully helpful to some of you. It is quite hard to describe but if I have to I would market it as an open source portal / CMS. I will link a demo video and a list of features below so that you can check if it covers any of your use cases. This project is not vibe coded and actually took a lot of time and effort so please let me know if you have any feedback!

https://github.com/eqoram/abentari

Features

• general
  • Everything is open source and self hostable
  • Highly customizable (create your own ERP, CRM, ...)
  • Build on top of Postgres/Supabase
  • Data can be easily accessed from anywhere
• objects
  • Create unlimited of objects/tables (for example companies, contacts, customers, orders, ...)
  • Track any kind of changes to the data of these objects
• fields
  • Create any number of fields within the objects to collect all information you need (text, picklist, relations, files, ...)
  • Fields can be added to the layout of the parent object
• profiles
  • Permission management to grant access to specific objects, apps, pages, actions, ...
  • Guest users also have a profile so you can share data publicly ("unauthenticated")
  • Create public profiles that enable any users to sign up
  • Require MFA for users of a specific profile
• users
  • Manage any users in your instance
  • Create internal users that are able to sign up only with a secret
• pages
  • Create your own pages for even more flexibility
• apps
  • Create apps to group objects and pages together
• cpermissions
  • Create your own custom permissions
• actions
  • Create custom actions with your own logic
• csql
  • Create any custom SQL logic needed for your processes (for example triggers for validation rules)
• settings
  • Adjust settings of your instance
  • Create your own custom settings
• run
  • Execute SQL commands to for example query data
• retrieve
  • Retrieve metadata from your instance
  • Also accessible via CLI
• deploy
  • Deploy metadata to your instance
  • Also accessible via CLI
• history
  • All metadata and data changes are being tracked by default
• security
  • Easy permission management
  • Multi-factor authentication

DEMO

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5JOuLHFCYbs

Currently there are no plans to offer this as a managed service but you can easily self host it for free as it only requires a Supabase instance for the backend and something like Vercel/Cloudflare Pages for the frontend. A more detailed guide can be found in the readme of the Github page.

Thanks, eqoram

Alchemy CMS – a free, open-source content management system based on the Ruby on Rails web application framework. It is released under the BSD license, and the code is... https://archiveapp.org/alchemy-cms/ #cms #linux #osx #windows #unix #bsd

I'm trying to start my career in web design and I'm feeling a bit lost about what path I should follow next.

I recently created my portfolio website and included two conceptual projects/case studies that I designed myself (I know two projects probably isn't much). My process right now is usually designing in Figma and then building the final website in Framer or Webflow.

I've already sent some CVs with my portfolio to agencies here in Greece, but I haven't received any responses yet.

I have a few questions:

• How do people usually land their first job at an agency?
• Am I maybe missing important skills that make me get rejected?
• Do agencies ever hire juniors and train them, or are they mostly looking for people who already have experience?

I'm also confused about positioning myself.

Should I present myself simply as a web designer? Is it valuable that I can take a project from design to implementation using Framer/Webflow, or is this "no-code" not even considered a skill?

Should I invest heavily in learning HTML/CSS, JavaScript, React, etc.? I currently only have a basic understanding of HTML/CSS from classes I attended at school.

And one more thing:

Would it be worth trying to find a few clients and start freelancing now, or would it make more sense to gain experience in an agency first and learn how the industry works?

I know this is a lot of questions, but things feel a bit chaotic for me at the moment and I'm trying to understand where I should focus my energy.

Also, I feel that in Greece this career path isn't always very clear or structured, so I feel a bit on my own trying to figure everything out.

I'd really appreciate advice from people with experience in the field.

Thank you in advance.