JohnCMS

JohnCMS is an open-source PHP community CMS. It includes a forum, news, library, downloads, private messages, photo albums, and more — all in one package.

Features

• Forum — CKEditor-based editor with image upload, SEO-friendly URLs for sections and topics, polls, file attachments, topic pinning and closing
• News — unlimited nested sections, scheduled publishing, tags, comments, ratings
• Library — unlimited nested sections, user-submitted articles, moderation
• Downloads — file catalog with ratings and comments
• Private messages — with file attachments
• Photo albums — personal user albums
• Guestbook — site-wide and personal guestbooks
• Notifications — notification center with per-user settings
• Dark theme — built-in light/dark theme switch
• Multilingual — full i18n support via Crowdin
• Sitemap — automatic XML sitemap generation

Requirements

• PHP 8.2 or higher
• MySQL 5.6.4 or higher (MySQL Native Driver mysqlnd required)
• Apache with .htaccess support
• PHP extensions: imagick or gd, mbstring, pdo, simplexml

Installation from distribution

1. Download the latest release archive from the releases page.
2. Extract and upload the files to your server's web root.
3. Open http://your.site/install in a browser and follow the installer steps.
4. Delete the /install directory after installation is complete.

Installation from repository

1. Make sure you have Composer and Node.js installed.
2. Install PHP dependencies:

   composer install

3. Install Node.js dependencies and build the frontend:

   npm install
   npm run build

4. Open http://your.site/install in a browser and follow the installer steps.
5. Delete the /install directory after installation is complete.
6. Set up a cron job to run the scheduler every minute:

   * * * * * php /path/to/system/bin/console schedule:run --no-interaction
   

Installation with Docker

1. Copy the environment file and adjust the values if needed:

   cp .env.example .env

2. Build and start the containers:

   make build
   make up

3. Install PHP dependencies:

   make composer-install

4. Build the frontend on the host (the containers do not include Node.js):

   npm install
   npm run build

5. Open http://your.site/install in a browser and follow the installer steps.
6. Delete the /install directory after installation is complete.

The Docker setup includes Nginx, PHP-FPM, MariaDB, and Ofelia for running the scheduler automatically every minute.

Useful make commands

Command	Description
make up	Start containers
make stop	Stop containers
make restart	Restart containers
make rebuild	Rebuild and restart containers
make shell	Open shell inside the PHP-FPM container
make composer-install	Run composer install inside the container
make composer-update	Run composer update inside the container
make backup-db	Dump the database to a SQL file
make restore-db	Restore the database from a SQL file

For detailed Docker configuration instructions see .docker/readme.md.

Updating from repository

• If composer.json changed — re-run composer install.
• If package.json changed — re-run npm install && npm run build.
• If only .scss/.js/.vue files changed — re-run npm run build.
• During development, use npm run dev to start the Vite dev server with hot module replacement.

Documentation

Full documentation is available at docs.johncms.com.

Contributing & Translations

Translations are managed on Crowdin. Feel free to contribute or report issues on GitHub.