Imagine 6 - Elixir Phoenix-powered CMS

A ground-up Elixir rewrite of Imagine 5 (Rails), maintaining database compatibility as much as possible, to the point that both 5 and 6 can be run side-by-side, on the same database, to make the transition as smooth as possible.

Imagine CMS - A CMS that makes designers, developers and content editors happy

Imagine CMS is a web content management system first developed by Bigger Bird Creative, Inc. in 2006 for its clients.

Most CMSes come with a learning curve: not a big deal for daily users, but clients who only make changes once a month or so tend to forget everything by the next time they log in. Yet simpler systems don't offer enough flexibility to allow us to do what we want to do as designers and developers.

So we created a new kind of CMS, one that is easy for clients to use, stays out of our way, and provides a basic level of automation.

Philosophy

• Security
• Convenience
• Ease of Use
• Efficiency
• Flexibility

Pick any 5. 😀

Key Features for Content Editors

• Built to scale: Designed to operate sites with thousands of pages each, with the potential to scale further. This is a CMS you won't outgrow.
• Drafts (version control): Pages and templates are versioned. You can undo nearly anything. Don't be afraid to experiment!
• Edit your way: Switch between WYSIWYG and straight HTML at any time. (NOTE: Requires Redactor editor.)
• Redirects: You can create redirects by yourself, within the CMS.

Key Features for Managers

• Draft approval system: Restrict users from publishing drafts in certain areas, requiring an approval step, grant them full access in other areas. You're in control.

Key Features for Developers

• Elixir: The Elixir language makes it easy to build and maintain large concurrent systems.
• Developer-friendly: Developer joy is just as important as user joy.

Status

Already in use in production, for sites that don't need these features yet to be ported over from Imagine 5:

• User permissions and draft approval system
• Scheduling future posts & automatic expiration
• Page list RSS feed
• Photo galleries
• Search function

Planned features that go far beyond Imagine 5:

• TailwindCSS compatibility
• Multisite capability: Easily add new (sub-)domains (each with its own layout and templates) and move pages between them
• Newsletter subscriptions: Users can subscribe to page list updates and receive daily/weekly email notifications

Installation

See INSTALL.md.

Deployment

See DEPLOY.md.

Imagine 5 -> 6 Migration Notes

See MIGRATE.md.

Getting Help

You can get paid support and hosting for Imagine CMS straight from the creators: Bigger Bird Creative, Inc.

Contributing

Issues and pull requests welcome, especially related to code cleanup, testing, and documentation.

Note re: associations

Foreign keys are intentionally not created, to allow restoration of CMS objects later found to be deleted by accident (using version entries). In the future, a cleanup process will delete old orphaned objects after a certain amount of time has passed.