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FINE<\/a>, a San Francisco- and Portland-based brand agency, is open sourcing<\/a> the content management system<\/a> (CMS) it has developed in-house to\u00a0build sites for brands like Anchor Brewing<\/a>, Kimpton Residences at Seafire<\/a>, Pr\u016bf Cultivar<\/a>\u00a0(\u201cElevated Cannabis\u201d) and others.<\/p>\n It\u2019s no secret that there is already a plethora<\/a> of other CMS systems on the market and that it\u2019s hard to stand out in this crowded field. FINE, however, believes that\u00a0Fae<\/a>, as this new CMS engine is called, stands out for a couple of reasons \u2014 largely because of its focus on being lightweight and highly customizable. And because FINE has been using it to build its own customers\u2019 sites, it should also be pretty battle-hardened at this point.<\/p>\n It\u2019s worth noting that Fae (which stands for \u201cFine Admin Engine\u201d) is squarely aimed at developers. There is no WordPress-like setup procedure<\/a> that gives you a complete CMS with a working front end and back end in minutes.<\/p>\n As FINE director of operations Lori Dunkin told me, a few years ago, the company typically wrote a custom PHP-based CMS for every client.\u00a0That also meant a lot of its resources went into building those. With Fae, it developed a CMS system that it can easily customize for different clients without having to reinvent the wheel for every one of them \u2014 and now that it\u2019s open source, anybody can give that a try.<\/p>\n Typically, companies open source those internal products that they believe aren\u2019t major differentiators\u00a0for them. One could argue that a CMS system like Fae is pretty central to FINE\u2019s work.\u00a0Dunkin, however, noted that FINE believes that its differentiation is in how it\u00a0configures a Fae environment for its clients and how it works to distill its clients\u2019 brands into a data model. \u201cNone of that has to do with how the forms look or how you log in,\u201d she noted, and added that\u00a0because the new system is open source, clients aren\u2019t locked in and can easily move to a different agency if they want to. \u201cIt\u2019s in everyone\u2019s best interest for this to be a non-issue,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n Because it\u2019s based on Rails, developers can easily add additional functionality on top of Fae\u2019s existing features with the help of Ruby gems<\/a>. Thanks to this, the system remains pretty lightweight (unlike, say, Drupal)\u00a0while still offering the necessary flexibility to be useful for all kinds of\u00a0sites and applications.<\/p>\n The core features of Fae include authentication, support for multiple user types, the usual UI components\u00a0for field types, page structures, lists and workflows, as well as multi-language support, image uploading and processing, change tracking,\u00a0filtering and a global search tool.<\/p>\n Over the long run, the company hopes to build a community around Fae<\/a>, which is now available on GitHub. FINE will maintain the code and keep\u00a0the\u00a0open-source repository updated. Indeed, it\u2019s worth noting that there is only one version of Fae, and that the company isn\u2019t keeping any proprietary parts for itself. That, after all, would go against its stated principle of making it easy for its customers to take their sites and move them elsewhere.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.rsoftsolution.com\/blog\/wp-content\/plugins\/RSSPoster_PRO\/cache\/81319_cms-ui.png?resize=640%2C408&ssl=1\")
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