Learn more at ContentaCMS.org.

A lot has happened in the last few months since we started working on Contenta CMS. The process has been really humbling. Today we release Contenta CMS 1.0: Celebrate!

If you don’t know what Contenta CMS is, then visit http://contentacms.org to learn more. And if you are more curious check http://cms.contentacms.io to see the public facing side of a Contenta CMS installation. To check the more interesting features in the private admin interface install it locally with one command.

The Other Side

When we decided to kick off the development of Contenta we speculated that someone would step in and provide front-end examples. We didn’t predict the avalanche of projects that would come. Looking back we can safely conclude that a big part of the Drupal community was eager to move to this model that allows us to use more modern tools.

We are not surprised to see that the tech context has changed, that novel interfaces are now common, or that businesses realize the value of multi-channel content distribution. That was expected.

We did not expect to see how long time Drupal contributors would jump in right away to write consumers for the API generated by Contenta. We could not sense the eagerness of so many Drupal developers to use Drupal in another way. It was difficult to guess that people would collaborate a Docker setup. We were also surprised to see the Contenta community to rally around documentation, articles, tutorials, and the explanation site. We didn’t anticipate that the core developers of three major frameworks would take interest on this and contribute consumers. Very often we woke up to unread messages in the Contenta channel with an interesting conversation about a fascinating topic. We didn’t think of that when Contenta was only a plan in our heads.

We are humbled by how much we’ve done these months, the Contenta CMS community did not cease to amaze.

The Drupal Part

Over the course of the last several months we have discussed many technical and community topics. We have agreed more often than not, disagreed and come to an understanding, and made a lot of progress. As a result of it we have developed and refactored multiple Drupal modules to improve the practical challenges that one faces on a decoupled project.

We are very glad that we based our distribution on a real world example. Many consumers have come across the same challenges at the same time from different perspectives. That is rare in an organization, since it is uncommon to have so many consumers building the same product. Casting light on these challenges from multiple perspectives has allowed us to understand some of the problems better. We had to fix some abstractions, and in some other cases an abstraction was not possible and we had to become more practical.

One thing that has remained constant is that we don’t want to support upgrade paths, we see Contenta as a good starting point. Fork and go! When you need to upgrade Drupal and its modules, you do it just like with any other Drupal project. No need to upgrade Contenta CMS itself. After trying other distributions in the past, and seeing the difficulties when using and maintaining both, we made a clear decision that we didn’t need to support that.

This tagged release is our way of saying to the world: We are happy about the current feature set, we feel good about the current stability, and this point in time is a good forking point. We will continue innovating, and making decoupled Drupal thrive, but from now we’ll have Contenta CMS 1.0: Celebrate on our backs as a stable point in time.

With this release, we are convinced that you can use Contenta as a starter kit and hub for documentation. We are happy about your future contributions to this kit and hub.

See the features in the release notes in GitHub, and celebrate Contenta with us!

Thanks to Sally Young for her help with grammar and readability in this article.

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