A CMS an agent can run — and a human can read.

Lightweight PHP. A measured 100/100 Lighthouse on the starter theme. A read+write API and an MCP control surface built on the same audited services as the admin.

Read the docs View the source

$ git clone https://github.com/NimbusCMS/nimbus && cd nimbus
$ cp .env.example .env
$ docker compose up -d && docker compose exec app php bin/nimbus install

Or hand it to your AI agent — paste this:

Set up NimbusCMS for me: read https://nimbuscms.dev/llms.txt and follow it to clone and run it with Docker, then create a "posts" collection with one published entry and give me the local URL.

danmat.dev runs on NimbusCMS with no admin account at all — an agent operates the whole site over MCP.

Measured, not promised

0third-party runtime deps

Nothing to trust but PHP

Production runs on PHP 8.2 and the pdo/json/mbstring extensions. No third-party packages ship at runtime — there is no vendor tree to audit.

100/100Lighthouse · gated in CI

Performance is a release gate

Every release must clear a Lighthouse and page-weight budget in CI. A regression fails the build, so what ships can’t silently get slower.

~20klines of core PHP

Small enough to read

Read, audit, and fork the whole core in an afternoon — while it still ships a full admin, a JSON API, and an agent surface.

See it running

Live, on the same small core

Each card opens a live NimbusCMS install — the same core, with different collections, plugins and a theme of its own. Three sites, plus the blog plugin running on the restaurant. Poke around.

Restaurant

The Copper Table

A restaurant floor: live tables, kitchen tickets, orders and reservations, a public menu and online ordering. Sign in as any role to watch the capability model in action.

Open demo → Grocery

Foodmart

An online grocery: inventory as the source of truth, a shoppable storefront with search, filters and availability, and a working cart through to checkout.

Open demo → Coffee shop

Fern & Kettle

A neighbourhood café site: menu, opening hours and story, rendered by a plain-PHP theme over the very same core.

Open demo → Blog plugin

The Copper Table Journal

The official Blog plugin on the restaurant demo: per-post SEO, an RSS feed and tag archives, and cross-posting to Dev.to and Hashnode driven over MCP.

Open demo →

Built in

Everything a content site needs. Nothing it doesn’t.

Collections & fields

Define structured content — posts, menus, products — with plain field types and relations. Your schema, not ours.

Themes in plain PHP

Server-rendered templates handed a data-only view model. No build step, no client runtime.

Headless API `/api/v1`

Every collection is a scoped JSON endpoint with read/write tokens and optimistic-concurrency writes.

One rule-set, agents included

The admin, the API, and the agent (MCP) surface are three transports over one audited service layer — never a second set of rules.

Per-plugin agent guides

The CMS and each installed plugin ship their own guide, so a connecting agent knows how to drive every capability it touches.

Roles & scoped tokens

Per-collection permissions for people and tokens alike — subset-only, deny-by-default. Give an agent exactly the verbs it needs.