I have been building websites for 10 years or so and for most of that time been doing so professionally and I’ve seen many different CMS systems and built a few myself. Very often they felt like they’d been built by developers for other developers to use (which was great in some ways) but the most systems tended to get a bit bloated and difficult to understand. This lead me to believe that there was a better solution that could be built.
Now, I can’t say that I/we have used all or even most of the available CMS systems (since I doubt many can), nor can we say that you should always use Coaster (use WordPress for blogs – it’s what it’s good at). But what I believe we’ve created is something that is flexible from a developers’ point of view and also simple to use from a user perspective. Everything revolves around the admin interface grouping the content into the pages on which it appears which declutters the look and feel and explains what the user is editing.
At the same time the “behind the scenes” block system enables developers (and designers) to create beautiful designs that can be easily edited from the admin system and easily explained to the end user without having to add complicated plugins or extra menus to the admin. I could go on about the integration of the file manager, the permissions, publishing and versioning system and more but we believe we’ve created something based on a great PHP framework (Laravel) that developers and more importantly users, will love.
Coaster CMS Influences
- “In house” CMS solutions x 2
- Block concepts
- Menu concepts
- Permissions concepts
- Previous “in house” CMS built by myself x 2
- Block system and page focus
- Good admin design
- Content importance in admin
- The importance of having features like a contact form by default
- Focus on what the CMS is good at
- The importance of making the admin user friendly
- Plus many other subtle / not so subtle influences and some unique ideas
What we’ve created is on our opinion the best way to build a website, not a blog (although integrating wordpress is easy). A website with pages, a contact form that is easy to design and simple to update.