What is Raytha?
We are building an open source content management system on the ASP.NET MVC framework. There are plenty of good content management systems: WordPress, Umbraco, Drupal, Orchard — so you may ask why are we bothering to build another one? Well if you have ever used Sitefinity you’ll note that none of the open source CMSes have nearly as good of a WYSIWYG content editing system as Sitefinity — also none of these are nearly as developer friendly.
Our goal with Raytha is to build an CMS as user friendly AND developer friendly as Sitefinity, but make it open source. We wish we could put all of our clients on Sitefinity, but not all of them can afford it. With Raytha, we can bring our development costs down and give the community a more intuitive system than WordPress.
Of course we never plan to catch up to WordPress’s install base or plugin community, but for our nonprofit customers, and the tons of other nonprofits that we don’t serve, we believe we can create a CMS to give them a better experiencing managing and maintaining their websites.
Raytha will have all of the features commonly used by our clients and will be very developer friendly.
Hosting Requirements
- Microsoft ASP.NET 4.5 Hosting (Medium Trust / Shared Hosting is fine)
- Amazon S3 Account
- Mongo DB
You may be wondering why you need to use Amazon Web Services; well to keep security as high as possible, we want to restrict file uploads like pictures and documents, to an external source. Amazon S3 is pretty darn cheap, at 15 cents per gig. Eventually we may support multiple file system providers including a local storage provider.
And why MongoDB instead of SQL Server? You can get cheap / free MongoDB hosting from MongoLab and MongoHQ so we figure why limit ourselves to SQL Server. We may one day also create multiple database providers to support SQL Server and MySQL — but most of the data a CMS holds is non-relational anyways, so for fastest speed we are choosing Mongo.
Road Map
Core Features (March 31)
- Theming / Rendering Engine
- Page Templates
- Backend Page Editor
- Custom Controls
- Sitemap / URL Writing (Pages, Group Pages, Redirect Pages)
- Media Library / Upload to Amazon Directly
- SSL Detection / Redirection
- CMS Data Model
- SEO Urls / Titles / Descriptions
“Custom Post Types” / “Custom Modules” (April 30)
- Define Custom Post Types
- Customizable List View / Details View
- Code Generation to make it easy to query / CRUD from code
- Custom URL Routes
- Taxonomies
Form Builder (May 31)
- Create Forms
- Drag / Drop Forms into a Site
- Thank You Page redirection
- Form to Email, Form to DB
Search (June 30)
- Local Naive Search
- Google Site Search
- SOLR Integration
Enhancements / Optimizations (July 31)
- Robots.txt / Sitemap.xml
- Output Caching
- Page Revisions
- Automatic Database Backups
- Bundling / Minification / Version Stamped js / css