FUEL CMS hits GitHub!

This week we finally took the leap and released FUEL CMS onto github.com. Admittedly, it’s pretty scary to open up a large body of work for other people to dissect and critique especially after spending hundreds of hours working on it. However, we knew that in order for it to grow and mature the way we envisioned, it would need to expand beyond our small web development shop for others to test and contribute.

What is FUEL CMS?

To pull directly from our user guide:

At it’s core, FUEL CMS is a modular based, CodeIgniter development platform for creating web applications. You can create your models, views and controllers like normal and only use the CMS part when and if you need it. It’s a hybrid of a framework and a CMS.

FUEL CMS evolved out of the need for having a development platform that was a Framework first and a CMS second. CodeIgniter fit the bill as a lightweight PHP framework that didn’t try and do too much behind the scenes. It allowed us to cleanly structure our code and use MVC principles (when needed).

We developed it so it could be easily integrated into your existing projects allowing you to select where and how you want to use the CMS. The interface is highly customizable and easily extensible with modules.

FUEL CMS Modules

The current distribution includes the following modules:

FUEL Core Module

• Dashboard – View recent activity, recent FUEL CMS news, and allows other modules to integrate their own dashboard specific information (e.g. a twitter module could display the latest tweet)
• Pages – Create editable pages and assign them different layouts. Allows you to import static view files.
• Blocks – Create reusable elements of your site that may exist on multiple pages (e.g. header and footer).
• Navigation – Create or import navigation hierarchies that can be used for menus on your site.
• Site Variables – Assign variables globally to all or just a limited number pages.
• Users/Permissions – Add users and assign permissions.
• Page Cache – Clears the pages and template cache
• Logs – Clears the pages and template cache

Other Modules

• Blog – No need for a third-party blog. Create posts, categorize, comment, and reply a from within the FUEL admin
• Backup – Back up FUEL’s database and assets (e.g. images, CSS, PDFs, javascript etc). Includes script to be called by Cronjobs module.
• SEO – Analyze your page content the way Google looks at your page. Provides basic page title, headings, keyword count, and image alt tag information. Also test where your domain ranks in Google by keywords.
• Tester – Provides an easy and intuitive way to test your code. Includes ability to load database information and test your controllers.
• Cronjobs – Schedule recurring tasks (e.g. periodically backing up the database)

What FUEL CMS is Not

There are a few things we want to point out as to what FUEL CMS currently does NOT have:

• FUEL currently only supports MySQL. It does not support other databases (even though CodeIgniter does).
• FUEL currently only supports English.
• FUEL currently does not have an installer (although it should be as easy as setting up a normal CodeIgniter application).
• FUEL is not bug free (what is) and is currently a 0.9 release meaning that most of the features we want for a first release are there but it needs to be better tested by the community. We are currently tracking bugs on github.com

However, this is exactly why we open-sourced it so that we could fill in these gaps with the help from others. If you have suggestions, comments, bugs, please feel free to submit them on the GitHub issue tracker.

What’s Next

Although FUEL CMS has been in development over the last couple years, this feels like just the beginning. We are anxiously awaiting community feedback and looking forward to working with others to improve FUEL CMS. To better help facilitate the community, the website is slated for a redesign by the end of the year. In the meantime, you can expect to see more tutorials, documentation and tips on a frequent basis.

Thanks to all those that have provided feedback and submitted bugs so far.  To stay in touch with the development, follow us on twitter at @fuelcms or signup for our periodical newsletter at getfuelcms.com. Happy coding!