Remembering Anchor CMS
On a whim, today I searched for Anchor CMS, an old PHP CMS I tried out after I jumped off WordPress the first time. As soon as I started reading, I remembered that I had made this same search a little over a year ago - recent enough to remember the page.
The CMS was archived back in 2021 because the community didn't have enough time to commit to keeping it going. It's open source - these things happen. The sadder part is that the original creator, Charlotte (who went by Visual Idiot), died in 2020. The group trying to keep the project going had worked with her to make the CMS a real thing.
I remember Anchor being two things - lightweight and approachable. I was just starting to learn to write my own code and the design of the Anchor API was wonderful. It was PHP, which isn't my favorite by any stretch, but it wasn't scary to mess with. WordPress always felt way too hard to dive into as a beginner, so this was a great stepping stone.
Aside from the code being approachable, the community around the project was delightful. I remember the forums being friendly and the Anchor Themes team actually did helpful reviews and left encouraging comments on how to make the themes better. I actually have one still available - Barhop - which was probably my first actual open source contribution and one of the first "real" things I'd published as a noob coder and designer.
Aside from the good feels of using it, the CMS itself was light and smooth. Way smaller than WordPress and much cleaner on the admin side, it really made writing and creating template layouts easy to do. The plugin system was small and flexible and you could really push what a blog could do from an authoring standpoint.
For not using Anchor for too long, it really made a mark in my mind. It's a platform I'm going to miss. Looking on Github, there are some active forks so it may be a platform I come back to.
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