Made withOctober CMSClip

Making websites with October CMS - Part 01 - Installing October CMS

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Watch and Learn

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141K viewsJul 30, 201612:10 runtime

Learn to build websites with October CMS, a modern content management system built on the powerful Laravel framework. This tutorial guides you through the developer-first philosophy of October, highlighting its key features like the Builder plugin. Follow a detailed…

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What is October CMS?

A modern content management system (CMS) built on the powerful Laravel PHP framework.
Described as simplistic, modern, and universal, with a stable release dating from mid-2016.

Key Characteristics

Developer-Focused: Intended for developers who prefer working in a code editor rather than a click-based UI like WordPress or Joomla.
Client-Friendly Backend: While built for developers, the backend can be customized and simplified to provide an easy-to-use experience for clients to manage content.
Extensible via Plugins: The core functionality is extended through plugins. The video series will cover creating custom plugins.
Themable: October uses a powerful theming system, and creating a custom theme is the next topic in the series.

Installation via Command Line

The video demonstrates a developer-focused installation method using the command line.

Note
An alternative wizard-based installer is available through the official website but is not used in this tutorial.

Prerequisites

Composer: The PHP dependency manager must be installed on your system.

Installation Steps

Create the Project: Use Composer to download the October CMS files into a new directory.
```
composer create-project october/october your-project-name
```
Run the Installer: Navigate into the project folder and run the interactive Artisan install command.
```
cd your-project-name
php artisan october:install
```
Configure: Follow the on-screen prompts to set up:
- Database Connection: The tutorial uses SQLite, a simple, file-based database ideal for local development.
- Administrator Account: Create your admin username and password.
- Application URL: Set the local URL for your project.

Verifying the Installation

Frontend: Access the project URL (e.g., http://october-movies.dev or an IP address) to see the default demo page.
Backend: The administration panel is located at the /backend path (e.g., http://october-movies.dev/backend).

Important
The backend URL is /backend, not /admin or /wp-admin as in other systems.

Core Tools Mentioned

Builder Plugin: A powerful plugin that helps scaffold new plugins, create database migrations, and speed up development. development. It is mentioned as a tool that will be used heavily in the series.

Introduction to October CMS

Hello, this is Evan for watchandlearn.com and in this new video series, we are going to be creating a website using a new released, actually new stable release of October CMS. In this first episode, I'm just going to show you how you can install October CMS on your local system and then we'll go from there. But before we begin with all of that, I'm just going to take a few seconds or minutes to talk about October CMS.

So October CMS is a CMS based on a Laravel framework. It's a bit different from Laravel, the way you work with it, but I think anyone that is familiar with Laravel will be familiar with October once they start using it and figure out some of the October's concepts. I've been a big fan of Laravel framework for the last six months and I want the CMS that is based on that framework. And along came October. Actually, I've been watching the development of October for at least two years and quite recently they got this stable release, so I decided to make this video series. So the stable release of October was July 2nd, 2016, so quite recently.

Why Choose October CMS?

Let's check out some stats. So it has around 100,000 installations, but I don't think these numbers are correct. So as you can see, it has 289 plugins, but the last time I checked the plugins page, I think it was more around 500, not 300. It has 15,000 projects started, it has some teams and so on. So I've been using it for the last week, I've been playing with it and I must say it's a great CMS.

First thing you need to know about October is that it is made for developers. So there will not be so much clicking as it would be in something like WordPress or Drupal or Joomla or something like that. You do most of the stuff in your code editor. But also, October has this great plugin called the Builder, so it will scaffold the plugins for you. So it will make database migrations and so on. It's pretty cool, and we will definitely be using Builder in this series.

Also, let's just check out the reasons to use it. So it's simplistic, so once you get the hang of it, it's pretty simple to use it, but until you do, it's not that simplistic. It's modern, that's definitely sure. So it's based on Laravel framework and Laravel framework is on the cutting edge of web development right now. So it's made for people, it's universal and so on, all of these buzzwords. As you will see in this series, we will be creating plugins for October because they are the main building blocks, actually, of October CMS. We will learn how to install plugins, how to install October itself, we will create a theme, we will use that theme, and so on.

Developer Focus & Client Experience

So I hope you are excited with October as I am. You can also check this video intro and find some others on the internet to see if you like it, but I think you would like this CMS very much, especially if you're like me and like to do everything using your code editor instead of going through the administration and just clicking on stuff.

Also, one more thing about that. So it is made for developers to develop it, but you can easily make October CMS's backend to be very user friendly for your clients, as you will see in this video series. So you can hide some stuff from the user and just leave the editing of content and so on. So I would say for the client, for the end user of this product, it will be easy as using something like WordPress. So you have your what you see, what you get editors, you have all that stuff. You have media finders, you can easily manipulate images and so on. So actually, it's a well-rounded new great CMS.

It also has a let's say relatively big community around it because it is so new, but I think people are loving it more and more and I think it's a pretty good competitor to something like WordPress.

Preparing for Installation

Okay, so let's install October CMS. I'm just going to go to docs right here and then you go on setup, installation. As you can see, October CMS has this download the installer. So they have a wizard for installing October CMS. I'm not going to use that wizard, I never used it. So we are actually going to go and install it via command line. So you have this command line installation, go to console interface. You would have to have Composer installed on your system, but if you're doing web development, especially PHP web development, I hope you have Composer already installed. If not, just search the web for it and that's it.

So to install it via Composer, you just do this. So you just copy this and I'm, since I'm going to be installing this on Vagrant, if you want to know more about Vagrant, how you can set up sites for Vagrant, you can check out my video series about that. It has three videos and it will show you everything you need to know. But first of all, I'm just going to SSH into it and I'm going to go to my public folder.

Installing via Composer & Artisan

And in that folder, I'm just going to paste this link, but I'm going to use sudo because for some reason on my machine, permissions for Composer are kind of screwed up, so I have to use sudo. It's not recommended to do that, but what can you do. And of course, since all of my examples when we make something are for movies, I'm going to call this project October movies.

So october-movies dev-master. So you just do sudo composer create-project october/october then the name of the project. So it's going to create a directory or a folder for October CMS automatically and it's going to use this dev-master branch. Okay, we press enter and wait for a little bit and it will generate a key for your application and that's it.

Now we can just do October movies. So cd october-movies and right here you have to do php artisan october:install. Click that.

Now it asks you for database type. I will actually use SQLite for this video series, but you can use MySQL if you want. You just create your MySQL database and then it will ask you for a username, database name and so on. But if you are using SQLite, it's a file based database. Okay, so you just get this storage/database.sqlite file, something like that. So you don't have to have MySQL installed at all. So I'm just going to use SQLite for this example. Database path is going to be storage/database.sqlite. You press enter. Okay, first name Evan, second name, email address test.com, admin login is going to be admin, password is also can stay admin. Is this information correct? Yes. Application URL, I will actually do this: http://october-movies.dev. Okay. Configure Advanced options? No. And then it's going to create a migration and that's it.

Verifying the Installation

Now I will in the next video, actually not in the next video, but behind the scenes, I will set up virtual hosts for the next video. But in this video, we are going to access this application by going to my actually Vagrant. So I'm just going to delete this. So my Vagrant IP is 192.168.33.10 but if you're using something like XAMPP or WAMP or something like that, it will probably be localhost for you. So, October-movies. October-movies... just a second. October-movies that should be it. Okay. So you get this demo page. So that's the first page of your site.

And if you want to access the backend, you just do backend, so not admin, not administration, but backend. Go right in here and admin and the password is admin and you can log in to the administration area of October CMS. As you can see, the installation of CMS, of this CMS is actually pretty, pretty easy to do. As I've said, I haven't tried the wizard, but the wizard should be probably even simpler.

Conclusion & What's Next

And now you have this CMS menu right here, Media menu, Settings and so on. We will talk all about this in the later episodes, but for now we just installed October. In the next episode I will show you how to create a theme. So we are going to be starting creating themes for October CMS right from the start. And then we are, we will be doing our site, creating custom post types or plugins and stuff like that.

Okay, so this is it for this video. Thank you guys for watching. Please follow me on Facebook or on Twitter if you want. Like this video if you liked it. Subscribe to the channel if you like the content I put out. And that's it. In the next video, we are creating a theme for October CMS. Thank you for watching once again and I'll see you in the next one.