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Twill CMS — An open source CMS toolkit for Laravel.
Modern digital products are delightful and dynamic – the tools powering them should be too. It’s time for intuitive, powerful, and flexible publishing experiences. Meet Twill: an open source CMS toolkit for Laravel.
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Mubashar Iqbal
Hunter
Although I now work at AREA 17, I'm a user of Twill not a maker.
I've used Twill on client projects and a couple of side projects, and it makes it ridiculously easy to build a CMS for any type of website.
The team has done a fantastic job of creating a toolkit that saves me a great deal of time by reducing the amount of standard functionality I have to build, but maintaining flexibility so that features specific to each website are not a problem to build.
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A little background:
Twill is the CMS toolkit we use for all client projects at AREA 17 (https://area17.com). We build custom web and mobile apps and want our clients to enjoy all the features they've come to expect from a package CMS solution, but with a UI that is delightful, dynamic, and oh so easy on the eyes :)
Moreover, our clients are users of the Internet, using apps like Airbnb, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, etc. These platforms are intuitive and powerful. Yet, when it comes to content management systems, the bar is lowered to the year 1999.
Further, as designers, we want to give publishers the creative freedom to do whatever they want to make their content shine, but without breaking the design system we've created for them. Even further, as developers, we want to focus our efforts on the unique aspects of an applications instead of rebuilding standard ones – without compromising developer control.
Simply put, Twill was crafted with the belief that content management should be a creative, productive, and enjoyable experience for both publishers and developers. Yesterday we released it open source because we feel it's time to allow Twill to spread its wings beyond the confines of our agency, so that it can fulfill its potential as a premium CMS solution in a populated landscape of (what we believe to be) outdated ones.
We love using Twill and so do our clients. We hope you do to! And if so, we look forward to collaborating with you on this open source initiative so that it can continually fulfill its mission and become the CMS of choice for publishers, developers, and designers alike!
Here we go!
@geid This looks great! Is it possible to use Twill inside another product? For example, if I am building a 'university magazine publishing app' where students can create and share bulletins for their individual culture clubs - can Twill power the layout engine?
@gaurabhmathure Hey Gaurabh! Apologies for the delayed reply – we've been busy building and missed this somehow! To answer your question, yes, it's definitely possible to use Twill inside another product! Twill can be used fully headless, meaning you can hook it up to whatever frontend you like, and integrate it with other elements of your tech stack as necessary. That means there are a bunch of possibilities to integrate with what you're trying to build, depending on whether you are interested in building directly in a laravel application or in your own preferred stack. We won't get too far in the weeds without knowing more about your project! But there are lots possibilities – for example, you could explore different approaches based on whether you want your users sharing the same BE or auto-generating one for each individual user (or set of users). Check out the new architectural concepts section in our just-updated documentation (https://github.com/area17/twill) for more, and let us know if you have any questions! cc @geid
@alint Thanks! At this time, we don't have a public demo but it is something we're working on. Our focus until this point was to deliver the package itself open source and the documentation needed for developers to get started. It is super easy ... any developer who knows Laravel (or PHP for that matter), can set up a full-featured custom CMS in the same time it would take to do a packaged one (such as Wordpress).
https://twill.io/docs
@alint Just to let you know, we just launched a public demo https://demo.twill.io/ and also we're on Spectrum for chat https://spectrum.chat/twill