W

🧭 Presentation #

W is a lightweight CMS tool, meant to help you design a surprising website. Compared to other CMS, W tries to help spontaneity and for building heterogeneous web-spaces.

The project was initiated in 2018 by Vincent Peugnet which is an amateur computer scientist. It's developed on a voluntary basis, use PHP and is licensed under AGPLv3.

W is a wiki. Wikis are a type of Web building tools that encourage quick and easy edit of pages.
It's also inspired from personnal knowledge management (PKM) theory.
W is at the intersection of a website editor and a note-taking tool. This is both its advantage and its drawback: it can do both, but is limited in each direction.

That being said, W has some interesting features and a specific approach, that might interest some strange web builders.

✨ Technical highlights

🚧 Limitations

📰 Articles

In January 2025, Nosycat wrote a nice blog post: Make weird websites with W.

📷 Screenshots #

Desktop

Home interface

The home interface, is where editors can see all their pages. You can apply filters to view your pages. Those sames filters can be used to generated codes that can be pasted in the pages to create list of pages.

Edit interface

Edit the content of a page. A side panel is used to edit metadatas.

Media manager

Upload images from your device or from an URL. Create folders, move and rename your media files.

Mobile interface

W tries to be comfortable on mobile.

Themes

cycling through different W themes

Themes are here to set the mood. And it's very easy to create a custom one 😉

🔩 Installation #

Requirements

💡 W can run in a domain subfolder. (example: https://mydomain.com/wiki/ )

Install

There is two methods to install W, the first way is the simplest, but the second makes it easier to update.

Manually (by downloading a Zip file)

Download the latest W version: Go to the latest release page and under the "Assets" section, download the main Zip file (not the source code).

Unzip the content and upload it to your server.

Using Git

Clone the repo: https://github.com/vincent-peugnet/wcms.git

It is recommended to stick to a released commit. Checkout latest release number and then type: git checkout VERSION where VERSION is the choosed release name (ex: v3.8.0)

Then, type make to run the build.

Finally, open in your Web browser the URL that is supposed to serve W. A form will ask you a few questions in order to have a functionnal setup. During this initialization, an admin user is created and you'll be able to login using this account.

Update

Depending on how W is installed, you should follow the corresponding method.

Manual update

First, you have to backup some files and folders (copy them elsewhere temporarily).

When you're sure they are safe, delete all W's current install content.

Then, download the latest release Zip (under "Assets"), unzip it, and copy the files in order to replace the old ones in your install folder.

Finaly, copy back the three backuped paths (📁 databases, 📁 media and 📄 config.json).

Using Git

If you've installed W using Git, you can run git pull and then repeat the same steps as the install process: checkout a specific VERSION and don't forget to run make in the end !

🤙 Contact #

📬 Email

Feel free to email me for any question or sugestion.

vincent+w@club1.fr

💬 Matrix

There is a Matrix Room, feel free to ask questions in english or french.

Matrix #w-cms:club1.fr

❤️‍🔥 Acknowledgment #

Contributors

W is mainly maintained by Vincent Peugnet, with valuable help from Nicolas Peugnet, who designed many of the complex workflows that make W less easy to break. In 2024, W's interface was refreshed by Julien Bidoret, who used his skills as a developer and designer to make W more welcoming and intuitive.

Vincent Peugnet would like to thanks Fae Prevost Leygonie and Alix Turcq for their precious feedback and testing.

W was made using these open sources and free components :