FrancisCMS
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FrancisCMS is an open source IndieWeb-friendly content management system built with Ruby on Rails. It was conceived and is maintained by 
Jason Garber.
History
FrancisCMS began life on 2014-10-07 as a Sinatra application (hence the name) before becoming a Rails application before becoming a mountable Rails engine.
At present, FrancisCMS is a white label Rails engine meant to be included in an existing Rails application at a particular mount point (/, for instance). FrancisCMS provides models, controllers, and views for CRUD-ing supported content types. The host Rails application is responsible for providing a user authentication system, styles with CSS, and behavior with JavaScript. FrancisCMS also exposes a number of useful methods, helpers, and configuration variables available for use in the host Rails application.
FrancisCMS is no longer actively maintained and its original code repository was archived on 2024-04-07. Archived source code was subsequently moved to Codeberg on 2025-04-08.
Features
- Supports multiple content types (posts, links, and photos) with drafts, tags, and RSS feeds.
- Supports syndicating content types to several third-party silos.
- Receives and verifies webmentions, displaying verified webmentions on content pages.
- Provides alternative representations of content types as Markdown and jf2-formatted JSON.
- Inherits styling (CSS) and scripting (JavaScript) from the host Rails application.
- Delegates authentication to the host Rails application.
IndieWeb Examples
People currently using FrancisCMS:
- Jason Garber on sixtwothree.org since 2016-01-14 (publicly announced 2016-02-10)
Source Code
- FrancisCMS source code on Codeberg
License
FrancisCMS is freely available under the MIT License.