Setting up PHP October CMS

PHP has been around for a long time and the battle for a CMS seems to fall into two camps, Wordpress(which is a blog, but people use it for CMS) and Drupal, there are a few others, but these two, especially wordpress account for a lot of the CMS. I have a few Wordpress sites I run, but a few months ago, I decided to look into what might be out there.

I was on a Facebook group about Laravel, that is when I read a post about October CMS. I went to look at it and it seem pretty good. I finally now have it setup and the setup is straight forward and so far I like it a lot. I have a server on Digital Ocean and decided to give it a spin and use it for this blog.

The setup has a few basic requirements, here are mine:

• PHP 7.0.8
• Mysql
• Nginx

I used the installation wizard to set it up, here is the link to install it: https://octobercms.com/docs/setup/installation

Make sure you have all the PHP libraries installed, create a mysql user with an empty database, use their nginx config, and setup the crontab. There is one part that is left out on install guide, setting up the directory permission, here is the command I ran on the root directory of where I have the October CMS install:

chown www-data -R /-- install directory --/

After that the CMS should be setup. There is already a cool feature I like in October CMS, the ability to manage plugins and themes, it's not as easy as it should be with other PHP CMS. You can create an account on the October CMS website and can link it to your October CMS install. From the webapp, you can setup which plugins and themes you want.

The backend is pretty straigh forward and clean, so far so good. I will be migrating all my other sites to October CMS, it seems pretty simple, but looks like you can do a lot more with it.