Hi everyone. Thanks for the compliments and critiques. We're working hard to iron out the reported bugs. There's a few questions that keep popping up, so I thought I'd summarize the answers in a blog post.

Q: Given that the Fork CMS codebase is now open source, doesn't that make it less secure?

A: We don't believe in security by obscurity. No one knowing the code doesn't make it secure code. To the contrary, we believe by open sourcing Fork is going to become more secure. We're getting feedback from a lot of different users, with different (server) setups, who are going to do crazy things we never thought of.

Q: Is there an architecture to plug in our own modules?

A: Fork CMS is written as a modular system. The database model and directory structure is specifically architectured for module development. We're working on a system that makes custom modules installable in an easier way, so you can share your modules with the community (akin to installing Wordpress plugins).

Q: Why is the code so heavily commented?

A: We write a lot of comments, yes. When you're used to writing comments for everything, you're not going to forget when you're doing something funky code-wise. We also think new developers can learn a lot about the code by reading it: commenting helps there.

Q: Why your own CMS? Why not work on improving existing CMSes?

A: We built Fork, or should I say, we're building Fork — it's a continous development thing — with one vision: to build a very usable CMS that would enable people to manage their sites in great detail. We're not designer nor developer focused: we are end-user focused. You (as a dev/designer) should be able to hand off a website and know that whoever needs to manage the content can do so without external help. Without the need to call the web agency every few days because they couldn't change this or that. Without the developer having to hack in an endless flurry of feature requests.

That said, we're designers and developers ourselves, so we're also focusing on making it easy to design and develop for Fork CMS. Templates should be free of backend logic; we want an easy way to theme websites; we want to be able to create forms quickly; we want multi language support. We want all of this and more.

So that's why we built our own system.

If you have any other questions, please leave them in the comments - we'll discuss it there or write a second Q&A post. And if you haven't done so, download the Fork CMS public beta and give it a try!