Okay, we admit, these aren’t yet frequently asked questions. We just imagine they could be…
We see 3 use cases for AbterCMS:
Non-tech people and companies often need to maintain their websites to ensure it remains up to date. There are certainly many ways this can be achieved, but we believe AbterCMS has some great advantages over its “competitors”:
It comes with much fewer plugins, themes, bells and whistles than its heavy-weight competitors: Wordpress, Drupal or Joomla. This relative simplicity comes with a smaller learning curve and less things to search for. If you find that AbterCMS does not support features you really need, than obviously you should choose the technology that fits your needs. (Unless you’re motivated enough to add the module you need yourself of course.)
While not necessarily competitors in a business sense, it’s important to note that many non-tech people will prefer online services to host their websites. Example of these could be Wix, Ghost, Weebly, Slide, and Squarespace. If you’re okay with these companies locking you in into their ecosystems to some extent then they might be very reasonable choices for you. They will however provide you with less flexibility and they will either cost more, display ads on your website, or push you in other wise to pay them for their services. Also, if you need features like sharing files with certain customers or co-workers, then you will need to look for other solutions, like Dropbox for example.
So you have a great idea, you’ve created mockups or even prototypes and the market seems to like it? Cool, so what’s next?
There’s many reasonable answers to this. If you can build on existing open source software, it might make a lot of sense to do that in the first iteration to save as much time and money as possible.
If you’re basically about to sell products, you should check out Magento, Sylius or Thalia. If you can build on some open source ERP system like Apache OFBiz, Metafresh, or Odoo consider doing that. These application can save you so much time and effort that no CMS can possibly compete with them.
However if you think these heavy-weights will slow you down with their learning-curve or with the tech-stack that you want to bring in, then we can strongly recommend you AbterCMS over any others we’re aware of. Granted, AbterCMS isn’t even stable yet, therefore it can not compete with some others in features, nor does it ever intend to really. What it brings to the table is flexibility. Start your project right away with a PHP monolith right away, take advantage of the security features and flexible authorization system of AbterCMS and grow it into a language-independent swarm of micro-services and lambda functions operated on top of AWS and Kubernetes. We’ll guide you all the way and even hold your hand if we need to.
If you’re new to software development or have only worked with very specific tech-stacks, we think it will be great benefit for you to invest your time into AbterCMS because we aim to provide a lot of insight into software design, best practices of both the technologies used in the various implementations, testing and also operational tasks.
Because we believe in using the right tool for the job. This documentation needs to remain open to the public, so that anyone can improve it via a simple pull request. There is no need for any secrecy here, therefore no need for an admin interface either. Also, there are many great static website generators, but we love Hugo! (Probably because it’s written in Go.)