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DesertCMS

DesertCMS is the CMS built for small teams and individual publishers who need a durable public site, a quiet admin experience, and deployment artifacts that make sense on OpenBSD.

The public side is static-first. The admin side is server-rendered Perl CGI through slowcgi.

What It Is For

  • Photography, field archives, research collections, and small product sites that need more care than a generic blog.
  • Operators who want simple forms, clear publishing steps, and practical recovery tools instead of plugin-heavy admin sprawl.
  • OpenBSD deployments using httpd, slowcgi, SQLite, ACME certificates, pf, and plain filesystem backups.

Highlights

  • Static public output: published pages, discovery files, redirects, assets, and maps are written to the webroot.
  • Private media originals: uploaded originals live outside the served tree while public derivatives are generated separately.
  • Non-technical editing: visual page blocks, templates, navigation, redirects, site settings, backups, and media alt text are handled in the admin UI.
  • OpenBSD operations: installer, httpd config, acme-client config, pf rules, rc.d service file, validation script, and queue worker are included.
  • First-party features: analytics, comments, ratings, contributor sites, theme editing, maps, backups, and recovery tools are part of the system.

Start Here

PageDocumentation

This documentation is written like a compact markdown knowledge base. Use it as the working map for installing, operating, and extending DesertCMS.
PageDownload

Download the current DesertCMS release artifacts. Source is available for development and review; the OpenBSD runtime bundle is the practical server-side install artifact. DesertCMS is a Perl CGI application, so the...

A CMS should make publishing safer and operating the site less mysterious.

DesertCMS project note