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PitonCMS

Friendly and Flexible Content Management System

A Designer Friendly CMS

PitonCMS was designed to be designer friendly, giving great flexibility to the designer to build creative websites without requiring additional custom backend development.

Page structures, data fields, settings, are all easily extensible by modifying project JSON Definition files. These files can be checked into version control and pushed to other environments to promote layout and data changes without having to modify remote databases or push code.

PitonCMS is built on modern standards and packages:

• PHP 7.3+
• Runs on the Slim framework, fast and powerful
• Coded to PHP-FIG PSR-12 standards
• Composer for package management
• Twig to render HTML templates

Requirements

• *AMP environment with PHP 7.3+. PitonCMS comes with a Docker-Compose image ready to run for local development
• Composer installed on your development environment

Install PitonCMS

To install PitonCMS using composer from the command line, change directories (cd) to where you want to create your new PitonCMS project directory, and run the composer create-project command, but update <my-project-name> to the new project name (to use Docker ensure the project name is all lower case):

This will create a new instance of PitonCMS in a folder of the same name. When composer asks if you wish to delete any version control files say yes.

The create-project command will automatically run a post create script that:

• Updates the Docker Compose YAML files and Apache config files for your project
• Copies the config/config.default.php file to config/config.local.php, and sets appropriate local development environment settings

Run PitonCMS in Docker Container

If you have a Docker client installed on your computer, from the command line cd into the new project folder and run:

to build the Docker images. This is a one time step.

To start the Docker container and webserver, run:

To later stop your container, run:

If you do not have the Docker client, then run PitonCMS on your local *AMP server.

After starting your development server, open a browser and go to http://localhost. The first time you will be directed to the installer script. Enter your name and email address and click submit to build the database and add you as an administrative user.

Note: The installer script (public/install.php) deletes itself after creating the database. If for some reason the self-delete fails, be sure to manually delete this file. DO NOT commit install.php and/or push to a production environment.

Login to PitonCMS

PitonCMS does not store passwords. PitonCMS uses passwordless authentication by email.

To login, navigate to /login and enter the email address you used during the install. You will be sent a one-time use hashed token with a login link that is good for 15 minutes.

Sessions are valid for the duration set in the secondsUntilExpiration session configuration item, which defaults to two hours from the last request. This can be increased to any session length.

Inside PitonCMS Administration

After logging in to the PitonCMS administration back end, go ahead and explore. A good first stop is under the Tools menu is to review the client controlled site settings. Also review the Support documentation for Designer and Client.

First Project Commit

For your project using PitonCMS, before your first commit you should:

• Make sure that public/install.php has been deleted
• Consider whether to also remove vendor/ from .gitignore

There are various schools of thought on weather to commit vendor folders in your project. If you commit your composer.lock you should be able to install the same critical files by running composer install from the project root on another environment. But committing those same files assures you of maintaining the same file versions as well.

Backend Configuration Settings

After installing the project, inspect the config/config.local.php configuration file (which was copied from config.default.php as part of the composer create project step) to ensure the configuration values are set for your environment.

Do not update the config.default.php settings directly as those override the default file, make any desired changes in config.local.php.

DO NOT commit config.local.php to your version control system as it holds critical passwords and keys. For any instance of your PitonCMS project, you will need a local config.local.php file to manage local server settings.

Configuration Setting Options

Production Environment Flag

The production configuration setting flag should be set for your local environment. If set to true then error details are suppresed and sent to the server logs, not the screen.

When developing a website on PitonCMS with production set to false, the Twig cache will be automatically cleared when templates change, which helps the development process. However, this is not the case when set to true, in that environment the cache/ directory will need to be manually cleared when releasing template changes.

This should always be set to true in production.

Database

If using Docker for your local development environment the database connection credentials should have been set as part of the install process. For production, enter your production database credentials.

If using Docker for your local development environment the session settings should have been set as part of the install process. For production, be sure to set your desired cookieName and a suitably long and complex salt hash.

Session

Email

PitonCMS relies by default on your local mail client, but if that is not installed or your local ISP blocks port 25 then add your SMTP credentials.

Pagination Links

If you have many pages or media files, pagination controls will appear to manage the number of records on screen.

Updating PitonCMS

The PitonCMS system relies on a vendor package named pitoncms/engine which has the core PitonCMS code and files. To update PitonCMS, from the terminal in the root of your project run:

to get the latest version, and then commit the composer.lock file (and possibly commit the vendor folder).

Note: You should run the update command from your live webserver or inside the Docker container, as the update executes a script to set the Engine release number in the database, which needs to be running. To access the Docker container:

Where you replace piton with your project name.

The PitonCMS frontend project files above the vendor folder are never updated, so your custom files are never touched.