Bolt CMS

👉 Overview

👀 What ?

Bolt CMS is a lightweight, straightforward content management system built with PHP. It is designed to be simple to use for editors, yet powerful for developers, offering a variety of features to create and manage content on websites.

🧐 Why ?

Bolt CMS is important because it provides a streamlined and user-friendly way to manage website content. The system is built with modern open-source libraries, making it robust and flexible. With Bolt CMS, users can create and manage all types of content easily without requiring extensive technical skills. This makes it a preferred choice for small to medium-size businesses, bloggers, and developers who want to build a manageable and efficient website.

⛏️ How ?

To use Bolt CMS, first, you need to install it on your server. You can do this by downloading it from the official website or using Composer. Once installed, you can access the Bolt CMS dashboard where you can create, edit, and manage your content. You can create different types of content like entries, pages, and blocks. Bolt CMS also allows you to install and use different themes and extensions to add more functionality to your website.

⏳ When ?

Bolt CMS has been in use since it was first released in 2012. It gained popularity because of its simplicity, flexibility, and being open-source. Since then, it has been updated and improved regularly to meet the changing needs of web development.

⚙️ Technical Explanations

Bolt CMS is a content management system that is built on the Silex microframework and uses Twig for its templates. Silex is a PHP microframework that is based on Symfony components and provides a concise and extensible base for web applications. Twig is a template engine for PHP that provides a flexible, fast, and secure way to generate HTML output.

The core feature of Bolt CMS is its use of a flat-file database by default, but it can be configured to use MySQL or SQLite if needed. Flat-file databases are simple database systems that store data in a plain text file. This design decision makes Bolt CMS lightweight and fast, as it doesn't require a separate database server for most use cases. If a more robust database solution is needed, Bolt CMS can be configured to use MySQL or SQLite, which are more traditional relational database management systems.

Bolt CMS also subscribes to the Model-View-Controller (MVC) architecture. The MVC architecture is a design pattern that separates an application into three interconnected components: the Model, which represents the data and the rules that govern access to and updates of this data; the View, which is the user interface and displays the data; and the Controller, which manages the input from the user.

Another key feature of Bolt CMS is its support for responsive design. Responsive design is an approach to web design that makes web pages render well on a variety of devices and window or screen sizes. This feature is increasingly important in today's multi-device world.

Finally, Bolt CMS includes a feature called 'ContentTypes', which allows users to define custom content types with custom fields. This feature provides a great deal of flexibility for managing diverse types of content on a website. For example, a user could define a 'Product' ContentType with custom fields for price, weight, and manufacturer.

Let's take the example of creating a new ContentType in Bolt CMS; we'll create a 'Product' ContentType with custom fields for price, weight, and manufacturer.

Firstly, you need to navigate to the contenttypes.yaml file in your Bolt CMS configuration files. The contenttypes.yaml file is where all the ContentTypes in your Bolt CMS installation are defined.

Here's how you could define a 'Product' ContentType:

products:
    name: Products
    singular_name: Product
    fields:
        title:
            type: text
            class: large
        slug:
            type: slug
            uses: title
        price:
            type: float
        weight:
            type: float
        manufacturer:
            type: text
    default_status: published

In this YAML configuration:

• products is the key for this ContentType. It's used internally by Bolt CMS.
• name and singular_name are used to display in the Bolt CMS backend.
• fields defines the fields for this ContentType. Here we have title, slug, price, weight, and manufacturer. For price and weight, we're using a float type to allow decimal values.
• default_status is set to 'published', meaning new entries of this ContentType will be published by default.

Save the contenttypes.yaml file and the new ContentType will be available in your Bolt CMS backend. You can now create new 'Product' entries with fields for price, weight, and manufacturer.