Donations / Fundraising

Continued Development fund

DesertCMS is an OpenBSD-focused, Perl-based MasterCMS built for secure, static-first publishing and one-click hosted SubCMS deployments. DesertCMS is designed for people who want a CMS that is simple to operate, easy to understand, and built on durable technology. Your donation helps continue development, improve documentation, expand features, harden security, and make DesertCMS more useful for site owners, contributors, developers, and self-hosters.

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Raised USD 25.00 of USD 2000.00 goal
1% funded

1 donation recorded

Campaign story

Where your donation goes

Help Continue the Development of DesertCMS

DesertCMS is an independent content management system built with a clear purpose: make publishing durable, secure, and practical without depending on bloated stacks, fragile plugin ecosystems, or opaque hosted platforms.

It is an OpenBSD-focused, Perl-based MasterCMS designed to run on a straightforward, inspectable foundation: OpenBSD, httpd, slowcgi, SQLite, local filesystems, and static-first public output.

At its core, DesertCMS is more than a traditional CMS. It is a MasterCMS platform capable of managing and deploying hosted SubCMS instances on subdomains with a single click. This makes it possible for one main installation to support multiple contributor sites, client sites, project sites, community pages, or independent publishing spaces from a single operator-controlled system.

Why DesertCMS Is Different

Most CMS platforms start as page editors and become increasingly complex through plugins, third-party services, and layers of abstraction. DesertCMS takes a different approach.

DesertCMS is built around:

  • OpenBSD-first deployment
  • Perl-based simplicity and longevity
  • SQLite-backed content storage
  • Static-first public publishing
  • Private-source media handling
  • MasterCMS and SubCMS separation
  • One-click hosted subdomain provisioning
  • Operator-friendly maintenance tools
  • Practical built-in modules instead of plugin sprawl

Published pages and public assets are generated as static output whenever possible, while dynamic features remain reserved for the areas that actually need them, such as admin tools, forms, comments, ratings, memberships, checkout, and contributor workflows.

Uploaded source media stays private by default, with public derivatives and downloadable resources created intentionally. This design gives site owners more control over what is public, what is protected, and how their content is served.

What DesertCMS Is For

DesertCMS is being built for people and organizations that want a more grounded publishing system:

  • Independent publishers
  • Developers and self-hosters
  • Agencies managing multiple small sites
  • Local businesses
  • Community projects
  • Researchers and documentation maintainers
  • Photographers and media-heavy site owners
  • Nonprofits and donation-supported projects
  • Anyone who wants static-first publishing with a real CMS behind it

It is especially useful when you want the reliability of static output, but still need practical admin tools, contributor management, media handling, forms, memberships, shops, directories, documentation hubs, and hosted site provisioning.

What Donations Support

Your donation helps fund the continued development of DesertCMS, including:

  • Core CMS improvements
  • MasterCMS and SubCMS provisioning features
  • Security hardening
  • Installer and upgrade tooling
  • Backup and recovery improvements
  • Better documentation and tutorials
  • More first-party modules
  • UI and admin workflow improvements
  • Testing on OpenBSD deployments
  • Long-term maintenance and release work

DesertCMS is independent software. That independence is important, but it also means development depends on time, infrastructure, testing, and support from people who believe in the project.

Why Your Support Matters

A CMS should not require massive infrastructure to be useful. It should not force every site owner into the same hosted platform. It should not hide everything behind layers of complexity. And it should not make basic publishing, backups, upgrades, and recovery harder than they need to be.

DesertCMS is being built for a different kind of web: smaller, more durable, more understandable, and easier to operate.

Your contribution helps keep that work moving forward.

Whether you use DesertCMS, plan to use it, support OpenBSD-focused software, care about independent publishing, or simply want to see more practical alternatives in the CMS space, your donation helps make continued development possible.

Thank you for supporting DesertCMS and helping build a better foundation for independent web publishing.

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