Mr CMS

Mr CMS is an ASP.NET MVC 5 C# open source content management framework

Mr CMS wraps up a lot of the time consuming aspects of website creation. Mr CMS is a framework for developers create bespoke website whilst at the same time giving content editors an easy to use CMS.

Apps

Apps in Mr CMS contain all the functionality your website requires. For example, you might want a Blog App which contains page definitions for a list of blogs and a blog page itself.

Mr CMS comes with 3 basic apps, 'Core', 'Articles' and 'Galleries'. The CoreApp contains basic concepts such as login and registration. It also has some basic page types such as 'TextPage' which can be used as a base page type for other pages.

Ultimately though, you can throw these three apps out and start building your own if you want.

Creating your first Mr CMS App

The first step in creating an app is to create a folder in the Apps folder. For example, 'Blog'. In here create a file called BlogApp.cs.

public class BlogApp : MrCMSApp
{
    public override string AppName
    {
        get { return "Blog"; }
    }

    public override string Version
    {
        get { return "0.1"; }
    }

	protected override void RegisterServices(IKernel kernel)
    {
        
   }

    protected override void RegisterApp(MrCMSAppRegistrationContext context)
    {
    }
}

This registers your App with Mr CMS. Note that your App definition must inherit from MrCMSApp.

Next create a folder called 'Apps\BlogApp\Pages' and create a file called Blog.cs

public class Blog : Webpage
{
	[DisplayName("Featured Image")]
    public virtual string FeatureImage { get; set; }

    [AllowHtml]
    [StringLength(160, ErrorMessage = "Abstract cannot be longer than 500 characters.")]
    public virtual string Abstract { get; set; }
}

Note in this instance we are inheriting from Webpage. This tells Mr CMS that this page can be added to the CMS. Webpage has a lot of properties which are shared across all webpages, such as Page Tile and Meta Description. It also has BodyContent for the main body of text of any webpage.

Finally create a folder called Views\Pages and within that folder add a page to display the Blog.

<article>
	<div class="row">
		<div class="col-md-12">
			<h1 class="margin-top-0">@Editable(Model, p => p.Name, false)</h1>
			<a href="/@Model.Parent.UrlSegment" class="btn btn-default">Back</a>
			@Model.CreatedOn.Day @Model.CreatedOn.ToString("MMMMM") @Model.CreatedOn.Year
			<br />
			@if (!String.IsNullOrEmpty(Model.FeatureImage))
			{
				<a href="/@Model.LiveUrlSegment" class="margin-top-0">@RenderImage(Model.FeatureImage)</a>
			}
			@Editable(Model, page => page.BodyContent, true)
		</div>
	</div>
</article>

Note here we use @Editable - this allows inline editing of content. Passing in True/False argument will enable or disable HTML editing.

Finally you need to add a page in Apps\BlogApp\Areas\Admin\Views\Webpage\ to add the additional editable fields we defined earlier.

<div class="form-group">
	@Html.LabelFor(model => model.FeatureImage, "Article Image") <br />
	@Html.TextBoxFor(model => model.FeatureImage, new { data_type = "media-selector" })
</div>
<div class="form-group">
	@Html.LabelFor(model => model.Abstract)
	@Html.TextAreaFor(model => model.Abstract, new { @rows = "2", @class = "form-control" })
</div>

This is the page Mr CMS uses to edit your custom page fields.

At this point you now have a new page type which can be added to Mr CMS. You can have a lot more control over your pages and how they act by using DocumentMetadataMap<> - this class allows you to specify page behaviour, for example if you have custom Controller you'd like to use rather than the standard Mr CMS one you can specify that here.

The Mr CMS ECommerce App listed on GitHub has a lot more functionality to it that just a simple page, so if you'd like to see how more complicated apps are built check this project out.

Feature list

Unlimited document types
Lucene based search architecture - easily create search indexes for super fast content filtering and searching of '000's of items.
Layouts & Layout areas give complete control over widgets on each page
Bulk media upload and management
Azure or file based media storage
Inline content editing
Error logging
Task management
SEO - Control over meta details
URL History table - keep track of URL changes. When a URL changes create 301 redirect to new location
URL History - add URLs at will to create redirects or if importing from another system add in the original URLs here
Form builder - create forms on the fly and collect their data
Enforce user login to page
SSL per page
User management & roles
Document version control
Complete control of page meta data - I.E when creating a page type (e.g BlogPage) control what type of pages can be added below it, say weather the page can maintain url hierarchy, say how many children should show in the page tree in item (if there are 000's of pages you might only show the top 5 pages) and lots more
Content managed into apps
Themes - override standard views
Multi-site capability - run multiple domains through one set of files & admin system
ACL
Webpage import and export
Site duplication button to duplicate a website quickly
Azure support

Release History

0.5.1 - September 2016