
Show HN: Pagekit – A new, modern CMS built with Symfony components - HeyOlivia
http://pagekit.com/blog/2014/07/21/pagekit-public-alpha-launch
======
jasonlfunk
I've been looking forward to someone publishing a new CMS. WordPress is great,
but I've been wanting something new and fresh. I got the alpha installed and
it looks good but there is still work to do, but I like what I see. Keep it
up!

~~~
at-fates-hands
If you're into shiny new things, I'd recommend Keystone:

[http://keystonejs.com/](http://keystonejs.com/)

"Node.js CMS and web application platform built on Express and MongoDB."

It's a pain to get going on a Windows machine, but I got it working on my
Linux box inside of 10 minutes. If you're on a Mac, its probably about the
same time to get up and running.

It also uses Jade for templates along with Markdown.

~~~
aethr
The guys at Thinkmill recently did an amazing presentation at SydJS where they
released the full source to a Keystone app project. Should be a great place
for anyone starting out.

[http://www.sydjs.com/showbag](http://www.sydjs.com/showbag)

Big thanks to @bladey who put a lot of it together!

------
snarkyturtle
With the explosions of frameworks lately, it's refreshing to see that people
are still working on CMSs. It's interesting, though, why they made their own
templating language rather than use an existing one (twig, for example, is
used by OctoberCMS and there's even a Wordpress plugin.)

Also in terms of clients, it'd probably be useful to have a wysiwyg editor or
even just editable sub-fields that you can set for each page. Right now
there's no clear-cut advantage for using this over, say, a static-page
generator (except for the ORM, I guess).

~~~
w0rd-driven
Razr is largely inspired by the Razor view engine for ASP.NET. Twig is nice
and looks to be inspired by Ruby syntax, something I'm a little more familiar
with in using Octopress. Perhaps they wanted to introduce a templating engine
that was a little more familiar with someone coming from ASP.NET? I can only
really speculate as no definitive reason was given.

Writing their own templating engine is definitely an interesting choice and
one that follows the razor syntax makes it even more interesting indeed.

~~~
riquito
Twig syntax takes from Django/Jinja [1], not Ruby.

[1] [http://fabien.potencier.org/article/34/templating-engines-
in...](http://fabien.potencier.org/article/34/templating-engines-in-php)

------
err4nt
A little background on the folks who make PageKit: Yootheme is one of the
top-3 WordPress theme developers on the market, and they also support other
CMS's. They started with Joomla and after developing their own front-end theme
framework, they added support for WordPress as well. You could use the same
themes across multiple CMS installs - so if you work with their themes it
allowed you to be pretty flexible.

After building themes for years, now they have set out to create the CMS they
actually want to be using every day, the CMS that doesn't fight back when you
need to skin it, and one that lets you do what you need without trying to
'hide' all the settings and options deep inside menus.

I downloaded the alpha and tested it out and I'm thrilled at what I see. I
can't wait for this to mature and blossom into a usable product, and with
Yootheme behind it I know for sure there will be gorgeous themes available for
it! I'm really looking forward to how they solved my pain points working with
WordPress, the more I see the more excited I get about this project :)

------
anteht
Just a note — when trying to register an account the form rejects my email,
but got an activation email after 1-2 minutes anyway. Which also, out of sheer
confusion led me to probably double-register under different usernames and
multiple email-addresses.

Edit: but other than that — looks promising. Will keep an eye on it.

~~~
Oras
Same happened here

~~~
sagevann
It looks like the form is ajaxing out when you press enter. No 'loading' text
or other display and no redirect so browser doesn't indicate it's working.

------
Killswitch
Awesome project, being a PHP developer, I was waiting for someone to launch
something that could take some share away from Wordpress. I dig Ghost, and
their initiative, but I was not thrilled with it going on Node.js as it'll not
be adapted by Wordpress users.

~~~
jordanlev
There are _so_ many other CMS's... some of which are better than wordpress
(for certain people / certain workflows / certain tasks).

I'm a huge fan of Concrete5 ([http://concrete5.org](http://concrete5.org)) for
small- to medium- sized informational sites. Relatively easy to theme,
somewhat easy to develop against, and by far the easiest page editing
interface for non-technical end-users (it's all done on the front-end, not in
the dashboard).

ProcessWire ([http://processwire.com](http://processwire.com)) is also one
that looks really good -- stays _completely_ out of your way in terms of the
markup, and is a very rational system that is built up from very simple
conceptual building blocks to give you the flexibility to build whatever kind
of site you need to.

If "take some share away from wordpress" is what you're after (as opposed to
"a CMS that is better than wordpress for my own needs), perhaps OctoberCMS
([http://octobercms.com/](http://octobercms.com/)) is the ticket? It was
recently launched and appears to have a lot of momentum behind it and a great
community around it (probably because it's based on the Laravel framework,
which also has a lot of momentum and a great community around it).

Someone else mentioned CraftCMS as well, although that's not free/open source.

Not to mention the copious static site generators that are popular right now
(although asking non-technical customers to edit text files on a server is not
feasible, so those are mostly for developer or product sites in my opinion).

Best of luck!

~~~
Killswitch
Yes, I have been keeping an eye on October CMS, it looks promising. Laravel is
a great framework (I use it too, outside of my own).

------
steelcm
I incorrectly assumed from the marketing page that this was a hosted CMS. It
wasn't until after sign-up it became clear this was a self-hosted build. Why
do I need to sign-up when it's available on github?

------
drejohnson
Looks interesting and I will most likely give it try but when I think of a
"modern" cms I think more of the approach that prismic.io and contenful are
using. Decoupling the backend from the frontend and using RESTful services to
tie it together is a more "modern" approach, especially when web apps are
considered. I would love to see some opensource cms's that allowed me to use
whatever client side framework I choose to build the frontend.

------
dhawalhs
Is pagekit.com built using Pagekit?

------
kyriakos
Will be watching this project. My first concern though is that Symphony &
Doctrine could be an overkill for small sites on shared hosting.

~~~
HeyOlivia
It's using Symfony components, not the framework. It also is working great on
shared hosting.

------
snowwrestler
For those who don't know, the next version of Drupal (Drupal 8) has
incorporated components of the Symfony project into the core CMS code.

[http://symfony.com/blog/symfony2-meets-
drupal-8](http://symfony.com/blog/symfony2-meets-drupal-8)

It's still called Drupal, but in many ways it is sounding like a new CMS
compared to Drupal 7.

~~~
na85
My experience with building products with Drupal 6/7 is that it's great if
your use case involves staying within the very rigid boundaries of what Drupal
canonically does. If you need something custom or if you need highly-
performant code, you're better off writing it from the ground up, because
otherwise Drupal fights you the whole way.

~~~
snowwrestler
I think developer flexibility is one reason they are making such big changes
in the architecture for Drupal 8.

That said, well-written custom code should outperform CMS code, because the
CMS has to carry more overhead to offer flexibility for more people. That's
true of any CMS.

------
kalmanolah
In this era of frameworks, I'm glad to see a modern CMS pop up. Props for
that.

We really didn't need another templating language though. Especially one that
looks nearly identical to the blade templating language.
([http://daylerees.com/codebright/blade](http://daylerees.com/codebright/blade))

------
buovjaga
Bug report: "Learn more about Pagekit in the About section." links to a non-
existent page.

~~~
HeyOlivia
Thanks, it's fixed now.

------
qmaxquique
You can start working with this CMS right now. I created a new terminal.com
container with Pagekit up and running. Check it here:
[https://terminal.com/tiny/4NEUNXJUy8](https://terminal.com/tiny/4NEUNXJUy8)

------
oalders
I'm going to be in the minority here, but when I hear Pagekit, I think of
Apache::PageKit, also known as plain old "PageKit". See
[http://pagekit.org/](http://pagekit.org/)

------
josefresco
4 redesigns? That seems ...high? Maybe they're just being playful but I wonder
what the explanation behind the redesigns was.

*[http://pagekit.com/blog](http://pagekit.com/blog)

------
michaelmior
I'm confused of the title compared to the description of Pagekit on the
website. Is it supposed to be a CMS or an application framework?

------
bretthopper
Disappointing not to see an example app's source code. It's the quickest way
for developers to get an understanding of it.

~~~
koberstein
I suppose you could go here:
[https://github.com/pagekit/pagekit](https://github.com/pagekit/pagekit) the
link was kinda hidden but on the website somewhere

------
swah
Was it essential for this project to use PHP to compete with Wordpress? In
other words, does cheap, cheap hosting still imply PHP?

~~~
jakejake
I don't think it was a case of "let's make the next greatest CMS... what
language should we choose..?" I suspect it was more like "what can we build to
showcase Symfony." So, using PHP is somewhat the point of the project.

But, considering your question more generically as far as if you wanted to
write a Wordpress killer must it be written in PHP? I would say that currently
the answer is yes. PHP hosting is ubiquitous and you would face an uphill
battle if you also had to wait for shared host providers to provide another
environment.

It's kinda chicken/egg thing. If customers start requesting Erlang being
installed on shared hosting then providers will start offering it. The thing
is, most Wordpress customers don't give two shits about what language their
CMS is written in. I'd argue that many of them don't even know what language
it is written in.

------
beebs93
The first thing that caught me was the Snake-inspired logo. Very nice touch.

Looking forward to playing around with the demo.

------
andrewstuart
No matter what username i put in it said "not available

------
dharma1
do any of these new school CMS's give a relatively uncluttered/user definable
REST api for free for mobile clients? Preferably something self hosted

~~~
rhspeer
[https://doc.ez.no/display/EZP/eZ+Publish+REST+API](https://doc.ez.no/display/EZP/eZ+Publish+REST+API)

------
monkeynotes
i18n?

~~~
HeyOlivia
Multi-language not yet, but it is on the todo list. At the moment only
localization.

------
adamors
I was excited until I got to this:

> Razr Template Engine

Even if you don't like Twig (why wouldn't you?) there are at least a dozen
template engines already.

I wonder in what other places did NIH take over?

~~~
HeyOlivia
You can also use Twig as template engine. Not a big deal.

~~~
debaserab2
I'm inclined to agree with adamors, any time a framework says you can plugin
any templating engine, it's almost always more of a hassle than not. If you
choose a templating engine that is not a first class citizen of the framework,
you're often blocked from key features or functionality offered by the
framework. Even if a third party library bridges the feature gap, that library
often trails development of the framework or ends up unmaintained and
outdated.

I also agree that it's disappointing Twig wasn't selected. It's syntax is
incredibly common among templating engines so ramp up time for new developers
is usually short - and once you get into the more complex features it's pretty
dang cool.

