October CMS as you know it is Dead

We regret to inform you that October CMS as you have known it for the past 7 years is no more. The founders have decided to make it a paid proprietary product; unfortunately abandoning the open source community in the process as “source partially available” is not open source. The core maintainers of the project have forked, and will continue development as Winter CMS.

Demise of October CMS

As you may have heard; over the past month October CMS has been undergoing some dramatic changes in terms of project structure and the codebase that you rely upon for your projects. In addition to the removal of all of the core maintainers and the transition to a paid product / licensing scheme; a number of breaking changes have already been made to the codebase.

With these changes, the original founders of the October CMS project have decided to abandon the community of developers that made the project into what it is today in favour of focusing on small group of professional agencies that were a part of the Partner Program.

Rebirth as Winter CMS

As a result of these dramatic structural changes of the project that we rely upon to run our businesses, former October CMS maintainers Luke Towers, Ben Thomson and Marc Jauvin wish to announce the formation of the Winter CMS project, a community-driven fork of October CMS with a dedication to speed, security, stability, and simplicity. Along with Jack Wilkinson, we aim to continue to deliver a professional and feature-rich platform that you can rely upon for your websites and applications; as well as engage with the community and become a more community-driven project overall.

Winter CMS is a fork of October CMS as of v1.1.2 / v1.0.472, any of your October projects can be seamlessly migrated to use Winter instead as long as they are using a version of October prior to the dramatic changes recently introduced by the original founders.

For more information on the exact events that led to the decision to fork, you can view our announcement on GitHub.

Status of Winter CMS right now

Winter CMS is available now! The migration is easy, if you are using Composer you only have to change a total of five lines of code and then run composer update. If you were using the marketplace / backend updating system to stay up to date, you just need to add the following entry to your config/cms.php file and then check for updates in the backend like you would normally:

'updateServer' => 'https://api.wintercms.com/marketplace',

Note: The marketplace API for delivering updates via the backend is being finalized right now and should be ready by May 11th. You are still able to update this value in your config files now and then update later once the API endpoint for updates is live.

Check out the migration guide here!

Future of Winter CMS

While the core project and all of the useful RainLab plugins have been forked successfully and are currently available, there is still more work to be done on our end. We currently have the marketing site, documentation, release notes, and community Discord up and running; but we are still working on the official marketplace. 

In the meantime, you should be able to continue to use the existing October CMS marketplace, at least as long as they decide to keep that running.

Just some of the items on our roadmap include:

• Laravel 9 LTS support
• Tailwind support in the Asset Combiner (built-in PHP asset compiler)
• Tailwind UI based backend skin
• Core support for TOTP based 2FA
• Official CLI tool for improving your productivity as a Winter developer

We already have big plans for the future of Winter CMS, so we hope that you will choose to join us on our journey to becoming the best CMS available!

How can I stay updated?

If you’re interested in following the development of Winter CMS or supporting the project, you can do the following:

Onwards and upwards!