Updates have been decently sporadic, the last few weeks has been a break off after getting a ton done from the release of Adaptcms Alpha 2 up till middle January. Inbetween there we finished a ton of AdaptCMS stuff which will be detailed soon, but a huge amount of progress was done on the new version of AdaptCMS.com.

The site is getting a facelift and re-done totally, getting a lot more info packed in with a lot more user functionality. In the rest of the post I’ll go over some of the big things that will be on the site and how it will affect users. Continue on.

New Look

The most obvious thing to talk about is the new look. I wanted to stick to the orange, but I saw a great boostrap theme that used whihte and blue as well – perfect color choice to keep the look different from the other CMS’s (I now know joomla is blue, but our blue is lighter!) and still look good.

As with the CMS, the site uses Twitter Bootstrap – meaning a responsive design and looks great in every browser. The layout of most pages just overall is much more eye pleasing than the current site with a simple content area and text filling it out. By release, there will be lots of images (not overkill, but Documentation will have images as well as feature pages, etc.) to give a visual view of things, not just text.

We have a website spotlight on the homepage that will be updated with any sites that use the CMS that we come across.

Documentation and Information

While the site will look tremendously better and be easier to use, one of the things I’m really looking foward to is the plethora of information and documentation. Currently we already have a getting started guide with pictures, documentation done and we will have a CMS API Documentation detailing every file you would want to know about, API Documentation and features – more expected after that.

Documentation is simple and expected, but I’ll be the first to admit I am awful at it and don’t like it. Non-developer don’t understand it, but as a programmer you just want to make cool stuff or think of new stuff you could make – not document every inch of what you’ve made. But we’re evolving and the normal Docs detail most everything you need to know, the CMS API Docs will detail all the PHP stuff developers need to know and the rest will fill in the blanks.

The API

A brand new look, full documentation, pictures and guides seems like a lot (my fingers would argue it is), but the single biggest addon is easily the API. Out of the gate, it will be decently simple but has a ton of potential and already some great ideas for the future.

At the core, the API will allow the new AdaptCMS versions to interact with the live site doing stuff like getting the latest CMS version and checking Plugin/Theme versions as well as information from them. Requests are cached and our REST API is very quick and expect extremely limited downtime, so you are always kept up to date.

The public side of things will be, initially, a database of Plugins and Themes. All AdaptCMS-Made Plugins/Themes will reside here, as well, developers can easily submit their own plugin/theme. As a developer, if you do our 10 second signup, you can manage your listings in a dashboard and in the future see more detailed stats.

For non-developers, you will be able to search for plugins/themes, see the most popular/most downloaded plugins/themes, find them by tags and view specific plugin and theme pages. Depending on what the developer provides, at minimum it will detail the current version, supported AdaptCMS versions, description, image, author/download information and optionally install/features text.

Conclusion

Hopefully this has given people a good look inside at the site, we are trying everything we can to make not just the CMS – but the official site of it, the most user friendly and useful place that we can. This is only the initial version and enhancements in the future are a gurantee. We’ll post when the new site has launched, but right now with it fully supporting AdaptCMS 3.0, it will likely launch only when the new AdaptCMS is out.

Checkout a few pictures of the overhauled AdaptCMS.com

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