9 ms·

Monsti – a free and open source CMS written in Go

76 points by networked 11y ago

nodesocket 11y ago
Great job. I'd recommend a design/UX overhaul though, it is quite antiquated. Check out some of the awesome "admin" designs on https://wrapbootstrap.com https://wrapbootstrap.com.
milankragujevic 11y ago
Reminds me of http://monstra.org/ http://monstra.org/
laurent123456 11y ago
Application Error when trying to add a new node: curl 'http://demo.monsti.net/@@edit?New=1;NodeType=core.Document' -H 'Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8' -H 'Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate' -H 'Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.8,fr;q=0.5,fr-FR;q=0.3' -H 'Cache-Control: max-age=0' -H 'Connection: keep-alive' -H 'Cookie: monsti-session=MTQzMjg4NzIxOXxEdi01QkFFQ183b0FBUkFCRUFBQUpQLTZBQUVHYzNSeWFXNW5EQWNBQld4dloybHVCbk4wY21sdVp3d0hBQVZoWkcxcGJnPT18j8xqXJd7vkXLPEt-9PuzVGLpyUkPiar9vmT9j7Bv5qE=' -H 'Host: demo.monsti.net' -H 'Referer: http://demo.monsti.net/@@edit?New=1;NodeType=core.Document' -H 'User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 10.0; Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/6.0)' -H 'Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded' --data 'NodeType=core.Document&Node.Public=true&Node.PublishTime=2015-05-29T10%3A13&Fields.core.Title=sdfdfdsfdsfdsfds&Name=sdfdfdsfdsfdsfds&Fields.core.Description=&Fields.core.Thumbnail=&Fields.core.Body=%3Cp%3Esdfdsfdsf%3C%2Fp%3E%0D%0A'
- ushi 11y ago
  the demo is readonly
- lenlorijn 11y ago
  Before you enter the demo they say "(Read only! You'll get an error if you try to save anything. A complete and fully working example is included in the source distribution.)"
  - laurent123456 11y ago
    Right, sorry I've missed that.
hanlec 11y ago
As someone that have worked in the CMS space for quite a while (and ended up implementing a couple from scratch) I welcome any new solutions that are not antiquated. One thing that I've learned during that time (and does not apply only to CMS's but that the time I fully realized it) is that everything you build in your CMS should always keep in mind who is the main user and who is the main consumer. The first one I've developed focused on the consumers. And every content creator hated me sooooo much. I went back to the drawing board... no actually I sit with almost each editor and looked at how they bitched and tried to find workarounds. It was an eye opening experience.
- flinty 11y ago
  Can you recommend a starting point to building your own cms?
krat0sprakhar 11y ago
Haha! Love the logo - http://demo.monsti.net/static/img/logo.png http://demo.monsti.net/static/img/logo.png I wish I could come up with such cute logos for my side projects. Would make life all the more interesting :D
whizzkid 11y ago
I am more interested in performance part of it actually. - What is the memory and cpu usage when you get something like 500+ concurrent users?
- lojack 11y ago
  CMS's are one of the easiest pieces of software to naively throw a beefy caching server in front of. Not saying performance should never be a consideration, but for the vast majority of websites, especially "personal, small business, or small NGO websites" that should be all you really need.
castell 11y ago
Offtopic: a free open source Email server (SMTP, POP3, IMAP) written in Go would be awesome. I always hate how complicated and time consuming the configuration is of the good old postfix and the various other packages.
- miloshadzic 11y ago
  Not written in Go but look into OpenSMTPD[1]. [1]: https://www.opensmtpd.org https://www.opensmtpd.org
  - tracker1 11y ago
    Seems to be only SMTP... The issue with most Unixy mail kits, is it's a collection of software that isn't always well coupled, and bundled together in really haphazard ways... Many people want a simple interface that gives them administrative control (separate from physical accounts on the machine) that upgrades as a complete set... With Unixy mail systems, you update dovecot, crap, something else breaks.. you have an older mysql backing it, crap, everything breaks when you upgrade... there's too many disconnected pieces for someone that isn't a full time mail admin to effectively keep up with. I believe the original request is for something similar to say SmarterMail but open-source and free... something easy to setup, cross platform and packaged in a modern approachable language.... If I didn't have to work, I've often thought about doing something similar with Node.js
- pjc50 11y ago
  Go would help for security, but would it help for configuration? Unless you configure it purely by writing extensions in Go.
  - castell 11y ago
    > would it help for configuration Yes, definitely. Try to set up the whole email pipeline in Linux/*BSD. You need dozens of programs including sendmail/postfix and each has its own config format. Many of these programs had their first release in the late 1970s or 1980s and probably no one understand every flag anymore. It's very time consuming (at least 4 hours) to config all packages. How would a new implementation in Go help? It would be a clean break. Less features but a stable high performance implementation would be a win. Go is the ideal language for that task.
simi_ 11y ago
Good luck! By the way, there is a rather popular static site generator written in Go: http://gohugo.io/ http://gohugo.io/
- fit2rule 11y ago
  Another vote for hugo here .. its a very handy tool! Doesn't have all the up-front stuff that monti seems to have, but that has its positives too ..
- Kabukks 11y ago
  Check out Journey too: https://kabukky.github.io/journey/ https://kabukky.github.io/journey/ I'm the creator, I hope it's OK to post it here. It seems fitting.
buro9 11y ago
> No database required. Filesystems are the new database. So does this CMS support search? How does it manage permissions? I found the docs to be a little light on details. I guess that will change in time.
- chrneumann 11y ago
  For "heavy" stuff that requires indexing (and where indexing using directories doesn't fit), Monsti might use a technology like Xapian. It might even use a database for this. But always on top of the "real" data that stays on the filesystem. But it's not impemented yet and plans might chance.
piokoch 11y ago
Recently I've noticed a kind of a strange fashion in the way of advertising new software projects on HN. The most important information is not what cool things given project does, or what unique features it has but what programming language it is using. There is a lot of posts "New blog engine in Clojure", "Amazing email server written in Haskell", "Text editor in ECMA Script version 9", etc. Sometimes there is more to that: new project comes with better performance, easier code maintenance, clever algorithms used, novel architectural solution developed - stuff that really matters, but Monsti is an pathological example. The first sentence on their web page says that it is written in Go, as if it mattered for their potential audience, that is "personal, small business, or small NGO websites". Why should I choose Monsti over Wordpress? Is the installation easy? Does it work on a cheap website hosting? Can it survive Slashdot effect on that cheap hosting? How about comments spam protection? Is creating templates/themes super easy, maybe I can reuse the ones created for Tumblr? And so on. Programmers might want to know if the GO API is particularly well designed or maybe we can create hooks to customize some functionality or maybe there is some utility to monitor Monsti site statistics. Who cares that this stuff is written in Go and WordPress in non-fashionable PHP, while the latter offers something that is actually important for programmer, admin and site owner?
- deckiedan 11y ago
  It's because it's "Hacker News". The main audience here is hacker types who care about language. The main people to target with an open-source CMS, or with an email server or blog engine or whatever is the people who are going to want to hack it, and actually get involved in the project. Finding new contributors is really hard and important in a new open source project, and so advertising to find the kind of people who'd be interested in actually helping to write it is very important. Once a project is big enough, then sure, drop the language stuff down to page 3 or whatever. But until you've got a community of passionate developers, it's a key concern. IMHO.
- m0th87 11y ago
  A couple of years ago, we moved off of wordpress precisely because it was written in php. Once you're trying to do anything reasonably complex in a CMS, the architecture and the programming language matter, because you have to extend the CMS in some manner. For us, wordpress wasn't extensible enough - and php wasn't pleasant enough - to justify continued use of it. I imagine people in a similar position who want to use Go would give this a serious look.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
michaelx386 11y ago
Can anyone explain the significance of the @@ characters in some of the urls here? I've not seen these in urls before and wonder if there's a specific reason why they're there. Example: http://demo.monsti.net/@@login http://demo.monsti.net/@@login
- ravishi 11y ago
  Not saying that is the case here, but Zope used to use @@ in the URLs for view lookup. Like in /folder/item/@@editWithFancyForms.
  - chrneumann 11y ago
    That's the case. Monsti is influenced by Kotti which is influenced by Plone which is based on Zope which uses @@ for "actions" (or whatever they call them). Monsti uses @@ to distinguish actions from regular URLs.
srameshc 11y ago
Great work ! I can use it for learning :)

76 points by networked 11y ago

Great job. I'd recommend a design/UX overhaul though, it is quite antiquated. Check out some of the awesome "admin" designs on https://wrapbootstrap.com https://wrapbootstrap.com.

milankragujevic 11y ago

Reminds me of http://monstra.org/ http://monstra.org/

laurent123456 11y ago

Application Error when trying to add a new node: curl 'http://demo.monsti.net/@@edit?New=1;NodeType=core.Document' -H 'Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8' -H 'Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate' -H 'Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.8,fr;q=0.5,fr-FR;q=0.3' -H 'Cache-Control: max-age=0' -H 'Connection: keep-alive' -H 'Cookie: monsti-session=MTQzMjg4NzIxOXxEdi01QkFFQ183b0FBUkFCRUFBQUpQLTZBQUVHYzNSeWFXNW5EQWNBQld4dloybHVCbk4wY21sdVp3d0hBQVZoWkcxcGJnPT18j8xqXJd7vkXLPEt-9PuzVGLpyUkPiar9vmT9j7Bv5qE=' -H 'Host: demo.monsti.net' -H 'Referer: http://demo.monsti.net/@@edit?New=1;NodeType=core.Document' -H 'User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 10.0; Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/6.0)' -H 'Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded' --data 'NodeType=core.Document&Node.Public=true&Node.PublishTime=2015-05-29T10%3A13&Fields.core.Title=sdfdfdsfdsfdsfds&Name=sdfdfdsfdsfdsfds&Fields.core.Description=&Fields.core.Thumbnail=&Fields.core.Body=%3Cp%3Esdfdsfdsf%3C%2Fp%3E%0D%0A'

ushi 11y ago
the demo is readonly
lenlorijn 11y ago
Before you enter the demo they say "(Read only! You'll get an error if you try to save anything. A complete and fully working example is included in the source distribution.)"
- laurent123456 11y ago
  Right, sorry I've missed that.

hanlec 11y ago

As someone that have worked in the CMS space for quite a while (and ended up implementing a couple from scratch) I welcome any new solutions that are not antiquated. One thing that I've learned during that time (and does not apply only to CMS's but that the time I fully realized it) is that everything you build in your CMS should always keep in mind who is the main user and who is the main consumer. The first one I've developed focused on the consumers. And every content creator hated me sooooo much. I went back to the drawing board... no actually I sit with almost each editor and looked at how they bitched and tried to find workarounds. It was an eye opening experience.

flinty 11y ago
Can you recommend a starting point to building your own cms?

krat0sprakhar 11y ago

Haha! Love the logo - http://demo.monsti.net/static/img/logo.png http://demo.monsti.net/static/img/logo.png I wish I could come up with such cute logos for my side projects. Would make life all the more interesting :D

whizzkid 11y ago

I am more interested in performance part of it actually. - What is the memory and cpu usage when you get something like 500+ concurrent users?

lojack 11y ago
CMS's are one of the easiest pieces of software to naively throw a beefy caching server in front of. Not saying performance should never be a consideration, but for the vast majority of websites, especially "personal, small business, or small NGO websites" that should be all you really need.

castell 11y ago

Offtopic: a free open source Email server (SMTP, POP3, IMAP) written in Go would be awesome. I always hate how complicated and time consuming the configuration is of the good old postfix and the various other packages.

miloshadzic 11y ago
Not written in Go but look into OpenSMTPD[1]. [1]: https://www.opensmtpd.org https://www.opensmtpd.org
- tracker1 11y ago
  Seems to be only SMTP... The issue with most Unixy mail kits, is it's a collection of software that isn't always well coupled, and bundled together in really haphazard ways... Many people want a simple interface that gives them administrative control (separate from physical accounts on the machine) that upgrades as a complete set... With Unixy mail systems, you update dovecot, crap, something else breaks.. you have an older mysql backing it, crap, everything breaks when you upgrade... there's too many disconnected pieces for someone that isn't a full time mail admin to effectively keep up with. I believe the original request is for something similar to say SmarterMail but open-source and free... something easy to setup, cross platform and packaged in a modern approachable language.... If I didn't have to work, I've often thought about doing something similar with Node.js
pjc50 11y ago
Go would help for security, but would it help for configuration? Unless you configure it purely by writing extensions in Go.
- castell 11y ago
  > would it help for configuration Yes, definitely. Try to set up the whole email pipeline in Linux/*BSD. You need dozens of programs including sendmail/postfix and each has its own config format. Many of these programs had their first release in the late 1970s or 1980s and probably no one understand every flag anymore. It's very time consuming (at least 4 hours) to config all packages. How would a new implementation in Go help? It would be a clean break. Less features but a stable high performance implementation would be a win. Go is the ideal language for that task.

simi_ 11y ago

Good luck! By the way, there is a rather popular static site generator written in Go: http://gohugo.io/ http://gohugo.io/

fit2rule 11y ago
Another vote for hugo here .. its a very handy tool! Doesn't have all the up-front stuff that monti seems to have, but that has its positives too ..
Kabukks 11y ago
Check out Journey too: https://kabukky.github.io/journey/ https://kabukky.github.io/journey/ I'm the creator, I hope it's OK to post it here. It seems fitting.

buro9 11y ago

> No database required. Filesystems are the new database. So does this CMS support search? How does it manage permissions? I found the docs to be a little light on details. I guess that will change in time.

chrneumann 11y ago
For "heavy" stuff that requires indexing (and where indexing using directories doesn't fit), Monsti might use a technology like Xapian. It might even use a database for this. But always on top of the "real" data that stays on the filesystem. But it's not impemented yet and plans might chance.

piokoch 11y ago

Recently I've noticed a kind of a strange fashion in the way of advertising new software projects on HN. The most important information is not what cool things given project does, or what unique features it has but what programming language it is using. There is a lot of posts "New blog engine in Clojure", "Amazing email server written in Haskell", "Text editor in ECMA Script version 9", etc. Sometimes there is more to that: new project comes with better performance, easier code maintenance, clever algorithms used, novel architectural solution developed - stuff that really matters, but Monsti is an pathological example. The first sentence on their web page says that it is written in Go, as if it mattered for their potential audience, that is "personal, small business, or small NGO websites". Why should I choose Monsti over Wordpress? Is the installation easy? Does it work on a cheap website hosting? Can it survive Slashdot effect on that cheap hosting? How about comments spam protection? Is creating templates/themes super easy, maybe I can reuse the ones created for Tumblr? And so on. Programmers might want to know if the GO API is particularly well designed or maybe we can create hooks to customize some functionality or maybe there is some utility to monitor Monsti site statistics. Who cares that this stuff is written in Go and WordPress in non-fashionable PHP, while the latter offers something that is actually important for programmer, admin and site owner?

deckiedan 11y ago
It's because it's "Hacker News". The main audience here is hacker types who care about language. The main people to target with an open-source CMS, or with an email server or blog engine or whatever is the people who are going to want to hack it, and actually get involved in the project. Finding new contributors is really hard and important in a new open source project, and so advertising to find the kind of people who'd be interested in actually helping to write it is very important. Once a project is big enough, then sure, drop the language stuff down to page 3 or whatever. But until you've got a community of passionate developers, it's a key concern. IMHO.
m0th87 11y ago
A couple of years ago, we moved off of wordpress precisely because it was written in php. Once you're trying to do anything reasonably complex in a CMS, the architecture and the programming language matter, because you have to extend the CMS in some manner. For us, wordpress wasn't extensible enough - and php wasn't pleasant enough - to justify continued use of it. I imagine people in a similar position who want to use Go would give this a serious look.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

michaelx386 11y ago

Can anyone explain the significance of the @@ characters in some of the urls here? I've not seen these in urls before and wonder if there's a specific reason why they're there. Example: http://demo.monsti.net/@@login http://demo.monsti.net/@@login

ravishi 11y ago
Not saying that is the case here, but Zope used to use @@ in the URLs for view lookup. Like in /folder/item/@@editWithFancyForms.
- chrneumann 11y ago
  That's the case. Monsti is influenced by Kotti which is influenced by Plone which is based on Zope which uses @@ for "actions" (or whatever they call them). Monsti uses @@ to distinguish actions from regular URLs.

srameshc 11y ago

Great work ! I can use it for learning :)