(This article was autotranslated from Danish to English)
I think I've finally managed to find an Open Source PHP content management system that can somewhat match Umbraco on the Microsoft.NET platform.
I have worked with Umbraco for almost 20 years, and it has always been an absolute favorite of mine. Due to its simplicity and ease of use, it has had a great influence on how I think CMSs should be built. Yes, I am ofcourse heavily biased. But I have prior experience with a lot of systems. My career started back in the early 00s with TYPO3 for a number of years, got a few Mambo/Joomla tasks, Wordpress, Orchard and Composite C1 (now C1 CMS).
What I have been missing from the PHP platform has been being able to customize the backend as quickly and easily as you can with Umbraco. It may sound like a great sales pitch from an Umbraco disciple, but it results in shorter development time and significantly shorter training time when training new website administrators.When something works intuitively, even inexperienced users quickly solve any given work task
Traditionally, many CMSs on the PHP platform have been struggling with "feature bloat". Sometimes the user interface consists of way too many buttons and several ways of doing things. The most optimal thing is to design the user interface according to the users' needs, so that they feel comfortable using and navigating the system.
Enter… Bolt CMS
Bolt CMS is based on the PHP Symphony platform, which is a mature framework by now. I remember hearing about Symphony back in the 00's when I started using PHP professionally, so it's cool to see that it still exists.
I will not go into too much detail with the graphical structure of the administration, because it is the same as with most CMSs.
Just like Umbraco, in BoltCMS you also define your backend with a number of field types, for example a text field or an image field on a Content Type, and together this forms a kind of document template for which fields the CMS user sees in his backend when he or she creates a news item.
Bolt CMS calls the controls 'Field Types' and Umbraco calls them 'Data Types', but it's practically the same.
The smart thing is that when you have collected your fields in, for example, a content type of the type 'News', a menu item is automatically created on the left side of the administration, this is where the CMS administrator and the users perform all editing functions. In other words, you don't need to teach your users what a Content Type is in technical terms, you can just point them over the news section and then created news will have the fields that defined your content type: "Headline", "Author" etc.
- "Well, it also exists in other systems?", you might think. Correct, but most often as fixed elements, and then you have to install extra plugins or maybe even have your hands in the code pot yourself if you want to expand the functionality. After all, it is a choice you make if you want it. Here you don't have to make all the connections between your data models and your backend yourself. The CMS manages that.
That's why I like that the feature with the flexible backend structure is available as a built-in part of a CMS, because then you know what you have when you have to design your solution - and well into the future. It is extremely rare that a CMS manufacturer removes the basic elements, because then it is no longer the same product.
You don't always have the same security with external modules: External developers' plugins occasionally just die when they either lose interest or create something new. It happens to all CMSs between version jumps, and then you may be forced to delay an update of a CMS until you have a replacement ready.
To summarize an already long blog post: I immediately think that Bolt is a cool, well-designed product for small and medium-sized sites. When we have more than 50 pages in individual categories, I think it starts to get difficult with clarity. But try playing with it before you do your next project so you can form your own impression.
Link:
https://boltcms.io/
PS. An observation: You need to be careful about correcting Bolt's alias for a content type once it's set and people are adding data in the CMS. If you correct, the data written in the fields in Bolt's administration will disappear. However, you can always jump into the database and do the concatenation again manually with a sneaky SQL statement, as the people behind the system show here –> https://bolt.tips/en … enaming-contenttypes