Getting started

CMS39 runs on any server with PHP 8.5 and MariaDB. Each site has its own copy of the core, its own theme and its own database; the core is updated centrally.

Requirements

• PHP 8.5 with the json, mbstring, curl, libxml and simplexml extensions (plus gd or imagick for images)
• MariaDB 10.6+ (or MySQL 8) with InnoDB and utf8mb4
• nginx or Apache with rewrites: every request goes to public/
• Optional: Redis for caching, cron for scheduled tasks

Settings

All site settings are in the admin under Settings (the ⚙ icon). They are stored in config/config.json and read from code with:

$ttl = cms39_conf('cache.cache', 1);          // section.key, default
$types = cms39_conf('search.types', 'page,post');

Every setting has a default in cms39_conf_defaults(), so a new key works even on a site that has not saved it yet.

Updates

New versions come through the Update Manager. An update replaces the core and the plugins, applies database changes and logs every step to tmp/logs/update.log. The theme, config/ and the site media are never touched.

First steps in the admin

1. Pages: build the site structure (parent / child).
2. Theme → Site fields: logo, contact details, home page texts.
3. Theme → Menus: header and footer menus.
4. Settings: languages, email, cache, robots.txt.