October CMS release candidate review

October CMS is designed this way intentionally, you are supposed to extend it. The philosophy is about keeping it simple and allowing the developer to extend the platform in any way they wish. This is a great philosophy and part of what drew me to October.

Plenty of strengths

Just a quick glance at the October CMS 'Features' page tells you everything you need to know about its strengths. It has a clever and intuitive architecture. It has a great ajax framework that really is quite powerful and very easy to implement, it is designed to be easily extendable and of course, it is based on Laravel and so has all the amazing power that is inherent in the Laravel framework.

Oh, I see. This simple thing is unpossible right now...

After a few days / weeks of happily coding away on our site redevelopment I began to notice a recurring theme, implementing a relatively simple feature in a plugin was either more difficult than I thought was reasonable or was entirely impossible because of the restrictions of the platform. This was actually a deal breaker for me. There was some functionality that I absolutely needed for my new site, which was not possible in October CMS.

It got to the point where I needed to implement a 'repeater' type widget (basically a 'matrix' field in Craft CMS speak). A repeater widget allows you to create multiple blocks of content within a single field. For example, say you wanted to add a list of multiple features to a project page and each feature has an icon, a title, a link, and a description. One way to do this is to create a repeater widget and then add as many features as you need to the page, each with its own information. At least in theory you could to this.

Adding a repeater type widget to the first party 'Pages' plugin turns out to be impossible at this stage - it just can not be done. In fact, no widget which uses the ajax framework can be used in a plugin to extend the Pages plugin (or possibly any other plugin). So that essentially renders the repeater widget almost useless I'd say.

Help, I need somebody!

I spent several days searching for help on this and other issues and while the documentation is thorough, it's poorly organised and often closely related ideas and concepts are covered in entirely separate areas of the documentation, or sometimes are not covered at all.

There is an IRC chat room, which is great. Its forum is pretty active and is a good place to learn things that are not mentioned in the docs. The actual developers are active in the chat room and forum: speaking to the devs was how I learned the functionality I needed was impossible to implement.