Introduction
Welcome to the comprehensive documentation of Aetheria! This documentation will guide and assist you in getting started with our powerful content management system and empower you to create exceptional websites.
Whether you're a seasoned developer or a content creator, this documentation will provide you with the necessary resources and knowledge to harness the full potential of Aetheria.
In this introduction, we will walk you through the motivation of Aetheria, exploring some of its key features.
What is Aetheria?
Aetheria is an innovative and powerful content management system (CMS) designed to empower website creators with limitless possibilities.
It provides a robust platform for building and managing websites, offering advanced features like an extensible plugin architecture, unparalleled security measures, intuitive content management, responsive design, and much more features that will be added soon. Aetheria combines innovation, security, and user-friendliness, allowing users to unleash their creativity and deliver exceptional online experiences
Why Aetheria?
Aetheria was created because of the lack of a CMS that is easy to use, secure, and powerful at the same time.
As Aetheria was created from the ground up using the latest technologies it is easy to maintain and update. It follows and will adhere to the latest technologies and security standards.
Many CMSs are either too complicated to use or too simple to be useful. But Aetheria is different. It is designed to be simple and easy to use, yet powerful and secure. Let's check some of Aetheria's main competitors:
WordPress
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Ease of Use: WordPress has a user-friendly interface, making it accessible for beginners to create and manage websites without advanced technical knowledge. | Complexity for Customizations: Customizing WordPress beyond basic themes and plugins often requires coding skills or the help of a developer. |
| Large User and Developer Community: WordPress has a massive user base and an active developer community, providing extensive resources, tutorials, and support options. | Security Vulnerabilities: Not secure by default, lacks of most modern attack countermeasures. Regular updates and security measures are crucial to mitigate risks. |
| Extensive Theme and Plugin Ecosystem: WordPress offers a vast selection of themes and plugins, allowing users to extend functionality and customize the appearance of their websites. | Plugin Compatibility Issues: Mixing and matching plugins from different developers can sometimes lead to conflicts, compatibility issues, or performance concerns. Most plugins are moreover poorly developed, unmaintained, outdated or vulnerable. |
| Flexibility: WordPress can be used to build various types of websites, including blogs, e-commerce stores, portfolios, business websites, and more. | Performance Optimization: Improperly coded themes, excessive plugins, or low-quality hosting can impact WordPress site performance and loading speed, this makes it extremely difficult to optimize and scale. It is mostly impossible to reach SPA performances. |
| SEO-Friendly: WordPress provides built-in features and plugins that facilitate search engine optimization, making it easier to optimize your website for better search engine rankings. | Regular Maintenance: WordPress requires regular updates for the core software, themes, and plugins to ensure security, performance, and compatibility. |
| Content Management: WordPress offers a user-friendly content management system, allowing you to easily create, edit, and organize your website's content. | Learning Curve for Advanced Features: Mastering advanced features, such as custom post types, taxonomies, or creating custom page templates, may require more technical expertise. |
Wix
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| User-Friendly Interface: Wix provides an intuitive drag-and-drop website builder, making it easy for beginners to create and customize websites without coding knowledge. | Limited Design Flexibility: While Wix offers many design options, customization beyond the provided templates can be challenging compared to more flexible platforms. |
| Wide Range of Design Templates: Wix offers a vast collection of professionally designed templates across various industries and niches, allowing users to start with a visually appealing foundation. | Dependency on Wix: When using Wix, you are tied to their platform, making it challenging to migrate your website to another hosting provider or content management system. |
| App Market and Plugins: Wix has an App Market that offers a selection of plugins and apps to enhance website functionality, allowing users to easily add features such as forms, e-commerce capabilities, and social media integration. | Advertisements and Branding: Free Wix websites display Wix ads and branding, which can detract from the professional appearance of your site. |
| Customer Support: Wix offers extensive customer support through various channels, including email, phone, and a comprehensive knowledge base, providing assistance to users when needed. | Cost: While Wix has a free plan, upgrading to remove limitations and access more features can become costly, especially for users requiring additional functionality or advanced options. |
| SEO-Friendly Features: Wix provides built-in SEO tools and features to optimize websites for search engines, including customizable meta tags, URL structures, alt tags for images, and more. | Data Portability: Exporting website content and data from Wix can be challenging, which may complicate the process of migrating to a different platform in the future. |
Strapi
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Headless CMS: Strapi is a flexible headless CMS, which means you can use it to manage content for various front-end frameworks or mobile applications. | Learning Curve: Strapi has a learning curve, especially for users who are new to headless CMS or backend development. |
| Customization: Strapi allows extensive customization, enabling developers to tailor the CMS to their specific project needs. | Technical Expertise: Building and customizing a Strapi instance may require technical expertise and familiarity with backend development. |
| RESTful and GraphQL APIs: Strapi provides both RESTful and GraphQL APIs out of the box, giving developers flexibility in choosing the API approach that suits their project. | Performance Considerations: Depending on the complexity and scale of your project, you may need to optimize and fine-tune Strapi's performance to handle high traffic or large datasets. |
| Open-Source: Strapi is an open-source CMS, providing access to its source code, allowing for community contributions, and fostering an active developer community. | Security: Strapi is not secure by default, and it is your responsibility to ensure that your Strapi instance is secure. |
| Content Management: Strapi offers a user-friendly content management system, allowing you to easily create, edit, and organize your website's content. | Regular Maintenance: Strapi requires regular updates for the core software and plugins to ensure security, performance, and compatibility. |
Aetheria's solution
Aetheria's goal is to solve the main problem of all its competitors and improve the usability and security of the overall CMS. How?
Let's address the main problems of the competitors one by one:
Plugins security and compatibility
Aetheria's plugins can be developed by anyone but - for plugins to get listed on the official marketplace - each plugin is reviewed by Aetheria's team to ensure that it is secure and compatible with the latest version of the CMS. Additionally, plugins:
- Are analyzed to extract a permission list that the user can review before installing the plugin.
- Are analyzed to extract a list of the plugin's hooks it attaches to.
- Are analyzed to extract a list of security-sensitive operations they are likely to perform.
Performance
Aetheria is a 2 tier CMS, meaning that it is composed of a headless backend and a frontend.
The backend is a headless CMS, meaning that it is only responsible for managing the content and exposing it through an API.
Aetheria's backend is powered by NestJs, a NodeJs framework that is built on top of ExpressJs and uses TypeScript as its main language.
The frontend instead is a SPA (Single Page Application) that consumes the API and renders the content.
Aetheria's frontend is powered by Next.js, a React framework that allows for server-side rendering and static site generation.
This architecture allows for a much better performance than the traditional CMSs and allows for the frontend to be hosted on a CDN (Content Delivery Network) for even better performance.
Additionally, the 2 tier architecture allows for the frontend to be hosted on a different server than the backend, or even on-premise allowing for limitless scalability.
The frontend is not mandatory, you can use Aetheria's backend as a headless CMS and consume the API from any frontend you want.
Customization and design flexibility
The usage of a headless CMS allows for limitless customization and design flexibility, you can use any frontend, any framework or can opt into the default one.
The built-in block editor, powered by GrapeJs allows for a very flexible content creation experience and customization, allowing for the creation of any kind of content with ease. Think of it like WordPress's Gutenberg editor but on steroids and with a lot more flexibility and customization options.
Security
Aetheria's backend is built with security in mind, it is built on top of NestJs, a framework that is built on top of ExpressJs and uses TypeScript as its main language. Sensible default security measures are in place and the framework is built with security in mind.
Additionally, as the backend is a headless CMS, meaning that it is only responsible for managing the content and exposing it through an API, this means that the attack surface is much smaller than a traditional CMS.
Plugins are also reviewed by Aetheria's team to ensure that they are secure and compatible with the latest version of the CMS. Whenever a plugin is installed, the user is presented with a list of permissions that the plugin requires and can review them before installing the plugin.
A plugin can still be malicious and perform operations that are not listed in the permission list, but this is very unlikely as the plugin is reviewed by the Aetheria's team before being listed on the marketplace.
In any case, the user is always responsible for the plugins they install and should always review the permissions list before installing a plugin.
The introduction of a plugin sandbox is planned for the future. This will allow for plugins to be executed in a sandbox and will allow for a much better security. Note that this feature is planned but not scheduled.