play-cms

Overview

Why we've created "yet another cms"

We've developed the play-cms out of our needs for a large client project (online shop for a major swiss publisher). Play framework was the perfect fit, but there is no cms around. The requirements were too specific for a generic system, yet the client's web team required a good deal of cms functionality. Our main priority was to create a flexible play-based cms that supports you instead of standing in your way when developing a custom client solution. And since it was not our first cms, we gave it a spin.

When to use the insign play-cms

• If you need cms capabilities in your play project
• If your app needs authentication/authorisation
• If you want a deep and ready-to-use integration between cms and your custom play application

When NOT to use insign play-cms

• If you need a full-blown cms solution with enterprise features such as Magnolia or Alfresco
• If you need workflow capabilities (although you could enhance the play-cms in that direction)
• .. and you're ok to not use the Play framework

Feature overview

• Powerful yet light-weight cms - made for custom projects that require cms capabilities
• Content block based architecture - basic blocks provided - add your own blocks
• Comfortable authoring: WYSIWYG, frontend controls, drag and drop content blocks on the page - or pages in the navigation tree etc.
• Time-based publishing and unpublishing
• Role-based permission system: 
  • Manage users and roles from the backend
  • Assign inheritable permissions to content blocks and pages
  • Use these permissions everywhere within your application (annotation-based controller actions, or in code)
  • Integrate with your own user provider
• Various ways to integrate your application
  • In-page: Create custom content blocks that can be placed everywhere throughout the site
  • Whole-page: Create whole pages (where you control the url routing) and integrate cms features such as the navigation
  • In-content: Create custom filters that replace variables used in the wysiwyg editor with your own dynamic data
• Powerful and customizable caching patterns: Page-level caching, block-level caching, individual cache expiry settings etc.

Architecture

CMS Modules

The insign play-cms consists of the following modules: