skelpo/cms

Skelpo CMS is a content management system built specifically for the kind of website most businesses actually need: agency homepages, small business sites, marketing pages, documentation, and blogs. It is not trying to be an all purpose platform, an online store, or a forum, and it explicitly points people to other tools for those jobs. It is a headless CMS, meaning it only provides a backend and an admin panel for editing content. The public facing website is a completely separate codebase, owned and built by whoever is running the site, which talks to the CMS through a REST API. Every action in the admin panel goes through that same API, so there is no hidden special path. The project describes itself as opinionated: it ships with one rich text editor, one fixed set of eleven form field types, and one email backend configured at a time, rather than offering many configuration options. A short list of firm design choices shapes the whole project. It only supports MySQL as a database, has no plugin system or theme marketplace, requires meta descriptions and image alt text before content can be published, always sends emails asynchronously so failures do not block content saves, and treats good runtime performance as something checked automatically before code can be merged. It is meant to run as a single deployment per website rather than serving many customers from one shared instance. Under the hood, the project is written in native TypeScript and is designed to run especially well when compiled ahead of time with a tool called Perry, though it also runs normally on Node.js and Bun. It ships as three things: a small standalone binary, a Docker image, and an npm package, plus companion packages for talking to the CMS from a customer's own frontend code. As of the version described in the README, the backend, the admin interface, the client library, and a starter site kit are all built and have been verified end to end on a real example site. This project fits developers and small agencies who want a fast, low maintenance CMS and are comfortable accepting its fixed set of choices rather than a highly customizable system. The full README is longer than what was shown.