GoCMS aims to replicate the form and ease of WordPress back in its heyday. That isn't to say WordPress isn't still quite popular - I mean it only powers around 43% of the web. But, there was a certain... feeling that WordPress had back when. There were rules but they were loosely defined, and we took advantage of that. It was less of a platform of... pick a theme, pick some plugins, slap it together and call it a day. It was developer centric - you had to put in the leg work or look like everybody else (though honestly, people were probably fine with that.)

I've mentioned this before, why build a CMS at all when there's so many options? It boils down to one simple thing for me: there are no CMSes that divide things cleanly enough. What I mean by that is - when you look at WordPress, you can't build a theme without touching WordPress' guts. And then there's Drupal which goes a bit heavy on the separation: The idea is that anyone can make a Drupal site using just what Drupal gives you, a base theme and some CSS. Drupal LOVES semantic HTML - it's one of its best features in my opinion! But getting a site set up and running is far more complex of a beast than WordPress, and the maintenance makes it something you really shouldn't self host. You can, and I'm a big DIYer who thinks devs should take charge far more than they do, but I'm in agreement with Acquia here - you really really shouldn't.

So the idea here is simple - modules will exist, they live within the server itself. The server then exposes data to the front end. The front end consumes this data using templates. That's it. This data can be simple objects that expose their fields, or it can be complex, interactive objects with functions and callback and what have you. The idea however is that the site itself be primarily HTML driven. The administration panel does not exist to build websites, the developer who writes the HTML builds the website. Administration is for the owner, development is for the developer.

I feel like this is where every CMS out there wanted to be, but they all fail because developers. We're our own worst enemy - we want to bring others into the joy of our world often by over exposing the meat and potatoes of our work. This isn't GoCMS. GoCMS aims to allow a developer with back end expertise set up the server, a developer with front end expertise craft the HTML, and avoid as much as possible to ever let the two disciplines cross.