= All names have been changed to avoid unnecessary advertorial. =

Currently I'm assessing Automad to replace my CMS of choice - let's call it TakeUncomplexCMS. I've been using it for years and it used to cover most of my needs. Where it fell short, I just extended it with available plugins or wrote my own, because it was pretty simple to work with.

Unfortunately time flies by and the codebase, even though maintained, ain't getting any younger. It still does its job and is mature more than enough to cover even commercial demands, but it's reaching the border of maintainability and increasingly often I find it frustrating to work around design limitations with hacks and kludges. TakeUncomplexCMS by itself misses a lot of functionality that IMHO nowadays should be standard for any CMS that wishes to be something more than a toy. This missing functionality is added by a popular set of must-have plugins, but their code also ain't the latest, which lately leaves me with a lot of patching to do against the more modern iterations of PHP. Sometimes some plugins break other plugins, which doesn't help with my growing annoyance either.

Therefore I've been looking for a while now to try something different that would maybe become my new workbench. I already took a peak on some applications, including, but not limited to Grave, Prico, Anker, Rayzorre and a few others. I was very disappointed with each of them having it's own set of flaws, missing functionality or incompatibility with nginx and many being mostly a slapped-together-bunch of included third party libraries and Orchestra-based components coupled with obligatory Sprig bloat.

Automad has been on my eye for some time and I'm happy to see how it developed. It seems to have all the features I basically need and it does stay light on its toes, although it could be even lighter if dropping UIKit (almost half the size of the whole CMS!) and limiting fonts to ttf and woff2 with 4 variations (normal regular, normal italic, bold regular, bold italic). I also like the new interface in the dashboard a lot, though I'm not sure if it would not be better to move the global settings from the sidebar to a tob bar. This would leave more space for pages. In the current setup there may not be enough place for them if the list grows longer.

Initially I was confused about the file manager not supporting any subfolders, but then I noticed that each page has it's own set of files, which is a bit different than what I was used to, but actually quite intuitive. I also noticed that the UI can be almost fully translated (yay!), which I did. So if you're interrested in a Polish translation then I'll be happy to provide one as soon as I'm done beta-testing it. On a side note - it would be good to have a language switch in dashboard's user settings. This way if you have a multilang page with editors speaking different languages, each of them could have their UI in their language. Right now the language setting is missing from config.json. I tried to set it according to conf.php, but I couldn't do it in a way for it to be able to find the file, so for now I just changed it in conf.php.

Anyway, I plan to make a webpage with Automad. When I'm done, I'll share my thoughts and experience.

One other thing, I couldn't make Automad work on nginx with what was provided in the guide. I had to use this:

location / {
	try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php$request_uri;
}

it may have something to do with the fact that my php location is set to split path info:

fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+?\.php)(/.*)$;
set $path_info $fastcgi_path_info;
fastcgi_param PATH_INFO $path_info;