candyCMS is a modern PHP CMS with its main focus on usability, speed and security. It is designed to create new websites incredibly fast if you know HTML well. It is not designed to be installed by people who know web technologies only barely.

It provides...

• a blog that supports tags, RSS and full social media integration (via plugin)
• basic content pages
• a gallery with multiple file upload (based on HTML5) and Media RSS
• a calendar with the option to download iCalendar events
• a download section
• file management
• a newsletter
• easy and simple user management
• full logs of all actions
• Plugins to extend the functionality to your needs

... and uses...

• Twitter Bootstrap for its basic design
• Smarty as template engine
• Mailchimp for newsletter managing
• reCAPTCHA to protect spam (as plugin)
• TinyMCE as WYSIWYG editor (as plugin)
• BB-Code or Markdown to make editing easy
• SmushIt to compress images on the fly
• Facebook and Gravatar to display user images
• Composer to keep the software up to date
• 2click social share privacy and AddThis for social communication (as plugins)
• Google Analytics or / and Piwik to track your website

• easy internationalization and localization via YAML and automatic language detection
• best use of HTML5 to make life easier
• completely object oriented and use of MVC
• easy to extend
• supports different templates
• clean URLs due to mod_rewrite
• supports CDNs
• easy to update or migrate
• SEO optimized (sitemap.xml and basic stuff)
• many plugins and many other features

• at least PHP 5.3 & MySQL database (PHP 5.5 recommended - with Propel you need at least PHP 5.4)
• Imagemagick, GD2 and mod_rewrite
• an account at http://recaptcha.org to use captchas
• an account at http://mailchimp.com to use the newsletter management
• about 50MB webspace

1. Download the newest version of this package.
2. Download and install Composer via Terminal ( http://getcomposer.org ): curl -s http://getcomposer.org/installer | php into the root of your candyCMS.
3. Install the vendor packages afterwards: php composer.phar install.
4. Copy files from "app/config/samples/" to "app/config" and configure your website settings at "app/config/Candy.inc.php".
5. Execute the "/install/index.php" file via the browser of your choice. If an error occurs, you might have to give CHMOD 777 to app/smarty first or create this folder.
6. Follow the instructions (also on CHMODs) and make sure, you delete the install folder after installation.

To upgrade candyCMS, read the release notes (if provided) first. If no specific information are given, upload following folders and files and start the Composer afterwards (php composer.phar update): "index.php", "composer.json" and "install". After Composer has loaded all requirements, go to "install/index.php" and migrate your application to the newest version. Delete the install folder afterwards.

For version 3.1 and later it's important that you make sure, you also update vendor/tiny_mce to newest vendor/tinymce (included in this download). Paths within templates are not compatible to version 3.0!

In version 4.0 comments have been removed. You can simply include the Disqus plugin to provide them again. Backup your database before upgrading!

Icons were created by famfamfam.com. Big thanks to Hauke Schade who gave great feedback and built many impressive features.

candyCMS is licensed under MIT license. All of its components should be Open Source and free to use, too. Note that fancyBox needs a license for commercial projects.