Introducing CockpitCMS – a CMS for Developers

In this tutorial, we will see how to use Cockpit CMS to setup a CMS backend and to use the API interface provided by Cockpit to build a customized functional frontend.

Not quite like other “heavy weight”, or “fully fledged” CMS’, Cockpit is light weight and “bare”. It only provides a backend to manage meta-data and data entries, whilst the frontend is all in the developer’s hands.

Installation

A copy of Cockpit CMS can be downloaded here in zip form. After downloading, just unzip the archive to a directory on your web server that is accessible. In my case, it is mapped to: http://vagrant/cockpit.

Next, visit the installation page: http://vagrant/cockpit/install to start the installation process.

NOTE: Cockpit uses SQLite as its database engine by default. If you have not installed SQLite yet, please do so before the installation.

NOTE: Cockpit also requires that its /storage/data directory be writable. Please change the mode of that directory accordingly.

The installation is just one click. When the installation is complete, you will be greeted with this page:

Now we can log in with admin/admin and the backend administration dashboard page will be shown:

Well, we don’t have anything set up yet. Before we create our own content, let’s learn about a few key modules in Cockpit.

Modules in Cockpit

The two most important modules in Cockpit are: Collections and Galleries.

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by Taylor Ren via SitePoint