An Interesting CMS With Version Control is Now Open-Source!

Another one joins the open-source CMS club! With a recent announcement, TinaCMS has gone completely open-source, and is now easier to self-host.

If you are not familiar, a CMS (content management system) is a handy way of managing the content of a website; some popular names include WordPress, Ghost and Joomla.

In the case of TinaCMS, it is a headless CMS that features support for the Git version control system, with a focus on being code-first and fully typed. A couple of popular companies like Unity utilize it to maintain their documentation 🤯

Without further ado, let's dive into this.

Suggested Read 📖

TinaCMS: What to Expect?

Building on the work they did on the first release of their self-hosted TinaCMS backend, the developers have now made TinaCMS completely open-source, available under the Apache 2.0 license.

Earlier, the self-hosted backend was offered under a “source available” license. But, as we have seen in the past, it can turn out to be limiting in certain cases. The updated license should now more accurately reflect the open-source nature of TinaCMS.

James O'Halloran from TinaCMS also added that:

While this was a very permissive license, we still want developers to feel comfortable building on TinaCMS without fearing that they'll hit a ceiling.

More power to the developers if you ask me! 😄

Seeing that, would you be interested in deploying your own TinaCMS instance?

If yes, then there are two main ways of self-hosting TinaCMS.

The first one is the most straightforward, with the developers also showcasing a demo for it. It is via a GitHub/Vercel implementation that can be built in a matter of minutes.

You can see for yourself. 👇

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You can access the self-hosted demo on GitHub.

The other way is to deploy it on other platforms, the self-hosted version of TinaCMS does not require Vercel, it can be used with any framework supported by TinaCMS.

You just have to make sure that your platform supports express request handlers so that the backend API can function properly.

For additional information regarding deployment, I suggest that you visit the official documentation.

You may also through the official announcement blog to dive deeper.

💬 This year has seen plenty of projects being made open-source. Which ones do you think should be made open next?