bPAD stands for Bert's Play And Design cms. It is a flexible, open source (web) cms that started life in 2010. The need came from my efforts to create device independent designs for my websites. That most webcms's are page-oriented, makes it more difficult to create great websites.
So I decided to create my own cms based on two assumptions:
The goal: to give the editor of the site full control over the structure and content of the site, while maintaining cross-device compatibility. Even creating the option to use the content in a non-web frontend (app or whatever).
The scope of bPAD so far:
The technology used:
Backend libraries:
For the web frontend:
The first version of bPAD was created in 2010-2013. But as with most projects started from scratch, the code base was created with a slightly different focus than the final product. Creating some issues with the maintaince of the code and some quality issues. So when in 2013 I decided to go open source, a full code rebuild was necessary to get the code up to standards.
This code rebuild is currently underway and progressing according to plan. The current version here on GitHub is basically usable, but not finished. The aim is to have a stable alpha version in Q3 of 2014. This version will be usable for stand alone websites.
After this initial version, the aim is to create a beta version of the site that also supports content, content block and design sharing between sites. This makes it possible for users to share content blocks or the design of content blocks with other sites, without any installation. This beta release is planned for the end of 2014 or the beginning of 2015.
Installation instructions are given with the releases. There is currently no installer. The code base is provided in combination with a prefilled database that contains everything needed to create a web site.