Lavavel top 5 cms

When talking about Frameworks vs CMSs, we usually compare one to another. But in fact there are quite a lot of CMSs that are built on top of frameworks! Laravel isn’t an exception and there are a few popular CMS projects which deserve attention. So I decided to look at the market and do a quick testing of those. Let’s see what I’ve found.

1. October CMS

URL: https://octobercms.com/
GitHub: https://github.com/octobercms/october
By far the most popular Laravel-based CMS on the market. And it deserves the popularity – from the CMSs I’ve tested this was the only one fully-production-ready: documentation, ease of use, plugins, themes, just take it and use it.
The first pleasant thing is a web-based installation process, which allows even to choose from three installation options: blank, theme or ready-made.

2. Asgard CMS

URL: https://asgardcms.com/
GitHub: project – https://github.com/AsgardCms and core platform – https://github.com/AsgardCms/Platform
Relatively new project, started in 2015, but already really strong. But this CMS is aimed more at developers, even install should be done from command line.

1. First you can get the code using the following command:
   
   composer create-project asgardcms/platform your-project-name

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   composer create-project asgardcms/platform your-project-name

2. Finally, run the install command to get you started:
   
   php artisan asgard:install

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   php artisan asgard:install

3. Done! Enjoy your freshly installed website. You can login to the back by going to the /backend URI.

Installation command asks you a few questions:

And then you login to back-end which is really simple and nice, pages are editable like this:

3. Lavalite

URL: http://www.lavalite.org/
GitHub: https://github.com/LavaLite/cms
Also a developer-focused project with impressive Laravel 5.2 version and typical command-line install:

1. composer create-project LavaLite/cms –prefer-dist website
2. Enter your database details in .env file on root folder.
3. Run php artisan migrate –seed to setup your database.

And after installation I can say Lavalite is both simple and usable. Admin area looks like this:
And Lavalite is really strongly maintainable: the last commit was just hours ago.

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And now we move to contestants which are not production-ready or I had troubles using, but still makes sense to review them.

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4. PyroCMS

URL: https://pyrocms.com/
GitHub: https://github.com/pyrocms/pyrocms
This one has an interesting history – it was re-built from CodeIgniter (PyroCMS versions up to 2.x) to Laravel (version 3.x), with latter having a new main committer and still in beta. Maybe that’s why installation wasn’t successful for me – here are the screenshots.
Visual installer, cool:

5. TypiCMS

URL: http://typicms.org/
GitHub: https://github.com/TypiCMS/Base
This one is totally for developers. All the information and documentation is directly on GitHub. It seems like there was a separate Laravel 4 version of this CMS, and now it’s migrating to 5.2 (not 5.1 or 5.0, sounds impressive!).
I succeeded at installing the system, but since I was testing on my Windows machine with XAMPP and TypiCMS requires Node.js and Gulp – I didn’t succeed at compiling front-end stuff. This is how it looked:

All good, right?
Then the error – npm install…

But in the end – installation succeeded, and the homepage loaded successfully, just without assets.