October CMS Review or Why October is the Best Content Management System

The world of content management systems has become much more massive than it was a few years ago. It may be quite challenging to choose the right CMS for your particular project nowadays.

Currently, the CMS market is mostly controlled by headliners such as Wordpress, Joomla! and Drupal. There are also CMS systems that focus on building web sites that serve a particular purpose, such as Magento for eCommerce projects or Ghost for blogs.

October CMS, in its turn, is considered an up-and-coming headliner. It is marketed as a platform that gets back to basics of web design and development, with its main focus to make web development workflow easy again. More and more web developers, designers and website owners are moving to OctoberCMS because of its simplicity, advanced security and ability to customize it for any type of project.

October CMS is capable of solving most tasks in contemporary web development and provides modern tools to do that through a graceful and enticing user interface with soft colors and an upright simple menu.

Let’s look through some of the features that make October CMS stand out.

1. Modern Laravel PHP Framework

October CMS core is based on modern Laravel PHP framework which is lightweight, sturdy and elegant. It is frequently being updated with new PHP capabilities. Laravel basis makes it a web CMS designed for creative vision. It does not place restrictions on page structure and HTML markup. This makes it very attractive for designers as it inspires them to break boundaries and take full advantage of their imagination.

October CMS updates will not get you in harm’s way nor break any part of your website or application because of its reliable Laravel-based modular core. Since 2015, Laravel comes in long-term support (LTS) version, which offers bug fixes for two years and security patches for three years. LTS releases come every two years, which is appreciated by enterprise users that value stability.

2. Back-End Design: Graceful, Elegant, Simplistic

October has a very clean and simple back-end interface, devoid of any unnecessary clutter. There is a main menu at the top and a submenu to the left. The submenu represents an expansion of the currently selected main menu item. The rest of the content area is reserved for performing back-end operations.

The back-end design of October CMS provides essential building blocks that allow you to create websites of any complexity.

• The pages section allows to create content for each of the website’s URLs.
• The partials section is reserved for building reusable chunks of HTML markup that can be included anywhere throughout the site:
• In the layouts section, users can create a page’s scaffold.
• You can also use the components section to enrich your website’s pages with features available through plugins. These are blocks of ready code that add new functionality and can be placed on any page or layout.

3. Powerful and Simple Customization

Users and developers can extend the CMS capabilities with plugins. Plugins are separate from October core so they can be installed and removed without any collaterals.

For example, this is how Google Analytics Extension plugin looks like:

4. Ability to Customize Your Website Without Programming Skills

October CMS is not only dedicated to developers; it is also user-friendly. Non-technical users can manage website contents, as well as images, videos and other files using the WYSIWYG editor. Website menus can be edited through a simple visual interface by using an appropriate plugin.

5. Marketplace That Grows Everyday

With October, you can save time by using existing third-party plugins and themes. You can also develop and reuse your own plugins and share with the community by adding them to October CMS marketplace.

6. Always Up-To-Date

October CMS receives regular updates so you can take full advantage of its capabilities and keep your website fresh, clean and shiny. You don’t have to keep track or update the components manually. Everything is taken care of for you and updates are just one click away.

7. Advanced Security

Since October CMS is built on the Laravel framework, the only file that can be accessed directly is index.php from the root directory. This cuts off any suspicious activity before it accesses the internals.

Additionally, all plugins go through a strict approval process to verify their quality and security. This assures you that anything added to your website is trustworthy and does not open a back-door for a potential security breach.

8. Great Documentation and Support

October CMS is intuitive and self-explanatory. It doesn’t make you struggle through the learning process and you quickly get used to its interface and capabilities. If you ever need help or have trouble using any feature, OctoberCMS comes with superior documentation on every aspect of building your website. Additionally, the founders regularly look through threads and topics of the support section, that’s why you are getting the best answers instead of random user opinions.

9. One of the Most Popular CMS on GitHub

October CMS, as well as the Laravel framework on which it’s based on, are among the top PHP projects on GitHub. At the time of writing this post, October CMS had over 6 000 stargazers, while the Laravel framework had over 35 000.

So, do you really need to choose October CMS for your next project?

The answer to this question is as simple as the system’s minimalistic interface and its back-to-basics approach to web development. OctoberCMS is powerful and provides a variety of features to build websites of any complexity, yet it’s not overloading you with tools you’ll never use. Its modern Laravel framework base is a joy for designers and developers as it allows to create the best looking, modern and secure websites out there. It provides great performance and load times with minimal database calls. It’s popular, well-supported and very stable. This is why we strongly recommend using October CMS for all your upcoming projects.

LOVATA company can help you make the most of October CMS’s capabilities and tailor them to the demands of your business. Please contact us to learn more.