[tbelldesignco]

TBCMS

Version 1.0 - WIP

About TBCMS

TBCMS is a working title for a content management system I am creating using PHP, HTML and Javascript. This project started April 2020, when I began looking for alternatives to Wordpress and simply was not finding a system that both looked visually appealing, but also offered an intuitive yet powerful content manager when it boiled down to page and post creation. Currently, the project is in a conceptualization stage, as I am fleshing out how the interfaces will look prior getting into the code. This CMS will be open source and free to use and will have a comprehensive knowledgeable for developers and designers a like to create theme and plugins for the platform.

Planned Features

TBCMS will feature a wealth of tools for content managers, developers and designers alike to use while creating top tier websites, themes and plugins. Features will include, but not limited to:

- Support for Forums & eCommerce

- Updater core with auto-update options

- Permalink manger compatible with NGINX and Apache

- SEO & AdSense Managers

I would love to hear your feedback on the interface designs and even what features you would like to see included in the development. This platform is being designed with ease of use at mind and you might have an idea or feature that I've not even thought of that would make the platform that much better. Thanks for all the support and feedback! Tyler

WIP Screenshots

Credits

Feather - Icons used in interfaces

[fitkoh]

It looks to be a very ambitious project. Something like eating an elephant - which can be done, but only one bite at a time.

There's no shortage of CMS systems available today. With so many different options to choose from, what do you want to separate your project from other CMS. What will you do differently? What will make you stand out as something unique? Wordpress is the popular and highly extensible with modules/plugins/themes - something for everyone. Ghost is an excellent minimalist system. Grav is known as a flat file cms that doesn't require database. Joomla has a reputation as being well designed for larger web portals. Where do you want to fit in? What's your niche?

My other big advise is to not reinvent the wheel. While it's great for learning to make everything from scratch, it's not necessarily the most efficient way to handle such a massive undertaking. You can easily take advantage of other open source assets when creating your project. There's free scripts for just about everything. There's no reason not to borrow/fork/hack from other sources, as long as you fulfill the licensing terms of whatever you're using. It could save you a monumental amount of time, and seeing how other people do things is also a great way to learn.

Just my two cents. Good luck with it. Be sure to keep us up to date when you have a demo to try

[tbelldesignco]

I thought I would write an update about the state of the project, I currently am using the core of TBCMS to create an ergonomic evaluation portal and the admin dashboard will look similar to the following screenshot, but will have some minor changes as development for TBCMS continues to develop. 



I still have more developing to do and I hopefully will have a big chunk of the interfaces for this project designed and have the server side code done for it by the end of the week. Some features I plan to get done include Content Management with the text editor completed, the shortcode widget interface as featured in my last post, and the updater system.

@fitkoh
My other big advise is to not reinvent the wheel. While it's great for learning to make everything from scratch, it's not necessarily the most efficient way to handle such a massive undertaking. You can easily take advantage of other open source assets when creating your project. There's free scripts for just about everything. There's no reason not to borrow/fork/hack from other sources, as long as you fulfill the licensing terms of whatever you're using. It could save you a monumental amount of time, and seeing how other people do things is also a great way to learn.

I do agree, but I am doing this in part for a work project, so I am having to kind of reinvent the wheel and since I am creating an entire core of a content management system, I might as well fork off of that development to minimize what I have already done. There is quite a bit I need to do to finish things up, but the product I've created for work is nearing the final stages of completion, so this will serve as V2 of ergoWare and V1 of TBCMS.

[tbelldesignco]

Update: I have been working on this project as I can, with my new job I’ve been pressed for time. At this time, I am working on the theme and plugin system with the first theme and plugin being similar to the current theme I’m using for my website and the plugin being a scrum which will allow for web developers and graphic designers to better organize their projects into sprints. I’ve not began to work on the admin panel, but that will be the next system that gets hashed out. With the first theme I am focusing on minimizing things to keep the css and js small that way smaller hosting packages will still be able to use this CMS.

With the admin panel the following features will be introduced:
- JS visual editor for pages and posts
- Plugin and Theme installer
- User Manager
- Update System

[Sn1F3rt]

Update: I have been working on this project as I can, with my new job I’ve been pressed for time. At this time, I am working on the theme and plugin system with the first theme and plugin being similar to the current theme I’m using for my website and the plugin being a scrum which will allow for web developers and graphic designers to better organize their projects into sprints. I’ve not began to work on the admin panel, but that will be the next system that gets hashed out. With the first theme I am focusing on minimizing things to keep the css and js small that way smaller hosting packages will still be able to use this CMS.

With the admin panel the following features will be introduced:
- JS visual editor for pages and posts
- Plugin and Theme installer
- User Manager
- Update System

Glad to see this project progressing, I'm excited to try it out myself once it's complete and out in public beta. Good luck!

[debjit]

I always love to see new vanilla PHP projects. Is the UI is custom or open-sourced?
It seems a private projects, the UI looks fresh minimalistic. You can implement a lot of open-sourced alternative to save times, CKEditor for textarea editing.
best of luck with your new adventure.

[tbelldesignco]

Glad to see this project progressing, I'm excited to try it out myself once it's complete and out in public beta. Good luck!

I am hoping that once I get the admin panel and some documentation created I will be able to put it out in private beta for everyone to test out that way I can collect feedback and start working on a public beta build. I've been working on the theming system over the past few days and building a custom theme. You can see the current progress at: archer.tbelldesign.co. It loads fairly quickly and currently is not devouring the resources allocated in the hosting provided by @phoenixwolf.

I always love to see new vanilla PHP projects. Is the UI is custom or open-sourced?
It seems a private projects, the UI looks fresh minimalistic. You can implement a lot of open-sourced alternative to save times, CKEditor for textarea editing.
best of luck with your new adventure.

The UI is custom at this stage, I will begin building CSS for the mockups that I have shown off in the screenshots above and things will refine as I continue to develop the project. I have been looking at open source block editors to see what I like and what I can do to enhance the features already provided by some of them. WPBakery is my favorite block editor, so that will be a huge inspiration with whatever I choose to be the base for the post/page editing tool.

[mzltest]

I am hoping that once I get the admin panel and some documentation created I will be able to put it out in private beta for everyone to test out that way I can collect feedback and start working on a public beta build. I've been working on the theming system over the past few days and building a custom theme. You can see the current progress at: archer.tbelldesign.co. It loads fairly quickly and currently is not devouring the resources allocated in the hosting provided by @phoenixwolf.


The UI is custom at this stage, I will begin building CSS for the mockups that I have shown off in the screenshots above and things will refine as I continue to develop the project. I have been looking at open source block editors to see what I like and what I can do to enhance the features already provided by some of them. WPBakery is my favorite block editor, so that will be a huge inspiration with whatever I choose to be the base for the post/page editing tool.

The current panel looks good however I suggest using toolbars for content creation rather than using dialogs as this simplifies the progress.

And from the screenshot I also advice that in homepage,the widget "post stats" should show comments in the "revenue" field for every posts as interaction is more important and there is already a separate widget for this.But I like the homepage that is widget based and further plugins can provide api to this.

[tbelldesignco]

The current panel looks good however I suggest using toolbars for content creation rather than using dialogs as this simplifies the progress.

And from the screenshot I also advice that in homepage,the widget "post stats" should show comments in the "revenue" field for every posts as interaction is more important and there is already a separate widget for this.But I like the homepage that is widget based and further plugins can provide api to this.

What is displayed are mockups so what you see may not reflect the final version. There will be toolbars in the editor, but dialog boxes are a cleaner more compact way to store content. If you look at some editors on the market, such as WPBakery and Elementor they have a healthy mix of tool bar and dialog boxes.

[tbelldesignco]

Update 4/4/21:

As I stated in my last update, I have been working on the file structure for themes and page content. Things in this department are going well and I began to include dynamic linking for pages, so using a pretty link structure if you were to create a page called Blogs, it would create a slug called blogs, so when you go to add the page into your navbar, boltCMS would add a link to "https://yousite.com/blog" and the system would pull the page and/or blog content from the database with content that includes the slug. The best part is that using one single php file, you will be able to view all published pages for your website, keeping file sizes small. I am also going to build in a cache system so that pages will be cached for 12 hours, unless changes to the page are made, so less resources will be used in the long run, especially if you have a high volume of traffic and lower bandwidth thresholds with your hosting package.