Today we're announcing an early preview of Cofoundry, a brand new open source CMS for .NET developers with an emphasis on:

Code first development

Unobtrusive integration into your application

Extensible & flexible architecture

Simple & user friendly content administration

The aim is to provide a lightweight framework that has content management and extensibility features whilst letting you take advantage of as much of the base ASP.NET framework and .NET ecosystem as possible.

Code First

We use the term Code First to mean that we put emphasis on writing code to express how our website should work rather than through GUI editors. We do provide a GUI for users to manage content, but definitions are always done in code.

Unobtrusive Integration

Cofoundry is there when you need it and gets out of your way when you don't. It can be frustrating to have to fight the CMS to achieve something you know can easily be done in the base framework and so we endeavor to build on top of what you know rather than create a whole new paradigm.

For a more comprehensive overview of Cofoundry features, take a look at the cofoundry.org homepage.

Open Source

Cofoundry started life as a closed source content management system built by Uber Digital. Over the past 10 years the platform has evolved through real world scenarios from a wide range of highly bespoke websites and applications. Our experience has taught us that whilst an established set of development tools and conventions is important, the ability to be flexible and deviate from them is key to producing truly unique websites and experiences.

During the process of open sourcing Cofoundry we've taken the opportunity to restructure and think afresh about how a modern .NET CMS should work. We think Cofoundry offers something different from other .NET content management systems, but your feedback is essential in helping us build a CMS for the future.

Try it out

The best way to get a feel for how Cofoundry works is to download a sample application. We've created two samples in two very different application styles:

Cofoundry.Samples.SimpleSite: This is a simple company website that includes several content managed pages, a blog and a contact form.

This is a simple company website that includes several content managed pages, a blog and a contact form. Cofoundry.Samples.SPASite: An example demonstrating how to use Cofoundry to create a SPA (Single Page Application) with WebApi endpoints as well as demonstrating some advanced Cofoundry features.

Other Resources

Alternatively if you want to jump straight in, Cofoundry packages are on Nuget and we've added plenty of documentation on GitHub.

Sending Feedback

Feedback is really important for us to make sure we have the core framework and overall direction nailed at this early stage. There's a number of ways you can get in touch:

Roadmap

This initial preview release is designed for you to get a feel for how Cofoundry works and for us to gain some insight into whether we are heading in the right direction. As such you can expect for us to break a few things as we solidify our framework and move towards a 1.0 release.

Cofoundry currently supports ASP.NET MVC 5 running on .NET 4.6.1, but this is an exciting time for the .NET framework and 2017 is looking like a good year to make the transition to .NET Core. We intend to move to ASP.NET Core in the next stage of development, and hopefully we will be able to target cross platform .NET Core a little further down the line.

We'll reveal a little more about our roadmap in the coming weeks. You can check in on our roadmap in the project wiki to see what's planned, alternatively you can sign up to this blog or follow us on twitter to hear the latest updates.