Fundamentals

Platformus CMS is modular and extendable, so its behavior is very dependent on the set of the extensions. The main and the only required extension is the Platformus.Core. It doesn’t provide any content management, instead it implements such basic things like reusable admin panel (or backend) UI, user access control, configuration, localization etc.

Depending on your needs and requirements you can either use other existing extensions to manage your content or write your own one(s). Anyway, the main purpose of the Platformus CMS is to save you from writing routine code, to speed up development, and to provide you with convenient and standardized admin panel UI. Also, you can write and then reuse small typical extensions from project to project.

Standard Extensions

There are 4 standard extensions:

Let’s look at a few usage examples to choose the best way to go. All these approaches do not exclude each other and can be combined.

Mobile app API with admin panel

You can create an empty web application, add dependencies on the Platformus.Core extension packages, and write a custom extension that will contain all the application-specific things: entities, models, DTOs, controllers, admin panel sections etc.

In this case you have the very basic things out of the box and do not need to think about backend UI, combining it using the built-in tag helpers like bricks. At the same time, CMS has no effect on performance, so you can get maximum of what the .NET gives.

Website

Most of the websites’ content is changed from time to time, so if you are using a cache, it could be not so important how many milliseconds it takes to retrieve from a database and display your data.

Development time is much more important in such cases, so you can use the Platformus.Website extension. It provides features to describe your content with classes and then create and use it as objects. This extension allows to avoid programming and, in many cases, trivial configuration and writing Razor views could be enough.

Ecommerce

Platformus CMS contains the Platformus.Ecommerce extension which contains standard ecommerce features such categories and products, filter, cart etc. It can be used as the NuGet packages, or as the source code. The second option could be useful when you need a very specific ecommerce app, so you can just use the source code as a simple barebone and implement features you need.