W-CMS

W is a lightweight CMS tool, meant to help you design a website using a unique approach. It's targeting artists, or experimental projects.

To have a better idea of what W can do, you can check out the webiste.

If tou want to try it out, you can :

• follow the install instructions to host your own instance of W.
• be hosted for free by club1.fr as an official tester (please contact vincent+w@club1.fr for more info).

W is a free and open source tool under the AGPLv3 License. The project was initiated in 2018 by Vincent Peugnet.

Ideas

W was first a tool, based on my way of thinking, as a protesis, to write on ideas and create a self explorating text point n' click game.

It's a mix between a drive, a wiki and a personnal blog. You can create page very quickly and share them with other people or keep them for you and restricted people.
There is no boundaries beetween taking notes and creating a website. When you create a page, you create a space in internet, a place, that can be public or private. Then, you decide to link it or not with the others places you've created before. There is a lots of possibilites of creations, for people who need to create multi-aspect labyrinth websites, to use a half public/private mindmap, or even interactives fictions.

Highlights

W try to help you create pages more spontaneously.

• Very lightweight page loading and editor
• Use standards to edit your pages : markdown, HTML, CSS and Javascript
• Media manager
• Multi-users
• Geolocalisation : generate map using page's coordinates (BETA)
• Flat file database
• Great website architecture design freedom
• url based command interface
• Images can be optimized for the Web when uploaded by editors
• 100% functionnal even without javascript

Screenshots

Homepage, showing your pages database.

Quickly edit pages as if you where taking notes. You need to connect as editor, then just type ../edit at the end of the page you want to edit ot use the menu.

Edit metadata on the left panel.

Manage your assets using the media manager.

You can even view a graph of links.

Rendering diagram

W page rendering is documented through this diagram.

API

An API exist but is experimental for now (v0). Find more info in the API documentation

Development team

W is a project created and maintained by Vincent Peugnet, an amateur computer science enthousiast who can only code in PHP. It includes Nicolas Peugnet (his brother) as JS developer, technical advisor. He's the one that take care of every challenges that are too complicated for Vincent. And more recently, Julien Bidoret joined the project and did an excellent job of refreshing the user interface. We can also mention Fae Prévost Leygonie as legendary number one user and issue writer too.

Thanks to

• James Moss's Flywheel Database
• Michel Fortin's Markdown Extra
• the Plates template engine.
• the advanced text editor Code Mirror
• the Cytoscape JS graph engine
• interactive map library Leaflet

How to install

Server requirements

• apache server
• PHP >=7.4.0 and the following extensions: curl mbstring xml
• optionally: gd or imagick PHP extensions for image optimizer feature.

W don't need any database manager as it use a "flat file" system.

You can put W at the root of your domain, or in subfolders. Then access the address in your browser and follow the differents steps.

Install using latest release zip

Simply download the latest realease from Github, and unzip it in your hosted folder.

Install using Git

If you have a SSH access to your server and you are familiar with Git, you can install W from sources. See Install from sources.

updating

1. update git

   git pull

2. choose a release tag

   git checkout TAG

   Replace TAG with release name (for example v3.5.0). Check the latest release to get the latest release tag.

3. build what's necessary

   make build

Development informations

If you want to contribute to the project.

Prerequisites

• PHP >=7.4.0
• PHP extensions : curl mbstring xml gd imagick
• Composer
• Optionally NPM

Debian and derivatives

sudo apt install php php-curl php-mbstring php-xml composer nodejs npm

Install from sources

1. Clone the git repository.

2. Install PHP dependencies.

   make vendor

3. Optionally install and build JS dependencies to get UI enhancements.

   make build

The last two commands can be run at once using only make.

PHP development

You can easily run a dev server using the serve target:

make serve

There is an error reporting debug mode using Whoops. It can be enabled by setting the value of debug in config.json to one of editors supported by Whoops.

JS development

While developing JS code it is useful to run webpack in watch mode so that the bundles get built at each file change. To do so, use the following command:

make watch

To run both the php dev server and webpack in watch mode, it is possible to run:

make dev

Run checks

Multiple tools are used to perform checks on the source code:

• phpcs to lint PHP code

  make lint

• phpunit to run unit test on PHP code

  make test

All checks can be run with a single command

make check [--keep-going]

Publish a new release

The release process uses GitHub's CLI so you will need to have it installed (sudo apt install gh). It also uploads sourcemaps to Sentry. So to create and publish a new release you will need two access tokens:

• a GitHub personnal access token with repository access
• a Sentry authentification token with project:read, project:releases and org:read access

saved in a .env file like so:

# .env
GITHUB_TOKEN='<github token value>'
SENTRY_AUTH_TOKEN='<sentry token value>'

Then, to make the release, run one of the following command:

make release-patch
make release-minor
make release-major

To only build the release zip, simply run make dist. This will create a zip file in dist/ of the current version.