IdeaCms
A single-deployment Blazor CMS for .NET 10: upload a .idea package and a page, theme, plugin or component goes live at once, with no redeploy and no app restart.
Try it: the public demo at mindattic-ideas-demo.azurewebsites.net is a vanilla install with every first-party package, wiped and re-provisioned every hour. The current admin login is shown (behind a human check) on the Ideas page of the company site, which itself runs on Ideas.
Why
- Host many pages, and many domains, from one App Service, one app pool and one database, instead of one web app per landing page.
- Ship a new page, theme or widget by uploading a zip. It is live the moment the upload finishes: no pipeline, no restart.
- Never break a live page by shipping. Versions are whole numbers that coexist, so
V2 lands beside V1 and pinned pages keep working.
- Never show a crash for a missing piece. A missing or disabled reference renders a clickable placeholder and raises an Admin Inbox alert.
- Write pages as free-form HTML. There are no zones, panes, slots or grids to fight, the opposite of DotNetNuke's fixed-layout model.
- Move a hand-built site between environments with one export/import file, packages included.
Features
Authoring
- Data pages: free-form
BodyHtml, PageCss and PageJs stored in the database, edited in the admin UI. This is the primary, zero-deploy path.
- Code pages: a compiled
.razor PageBase subclass shipped as a .idea, for real Blazor C# interactivity. A page can switch between the two as a row edit.
- Composition by tag:
<Component.Card />, <Plugin.Tooltip />, <Theme.Cyberspace />, with attributes flowing through as typed settings.
- Every Theme, Plugin and Component instance is configurable from a schema-generated admin editor, with Copy and Paste Configuration between instances.
- Every theme ships a light and a dark palette; the ThemeToggle plugin switches them without a flash of the wrong mode.
Packaging and versioning
- The
.idea package is a plain zip with one required idea.json manifest. Data packages install with zero build and zero recycle.
- Compiled packages load into a per-package collectible
AssemblyLoadContext, so uploads need no app-pool restart.
- Whole-number versions (
V1, V2), version-specific disable, and reference-guarded delete.
- Page history in SQL Server temporal tables: every page version records which citizen versions it carried.
- The
ma-idea CLI packs, inspects, lists, verifies, signs and wraps packages as NuGet packages, all offline.
- Every
.idea carries its own RSA-PSS/SHA-256 content signature, verified at the single install choke point.
Operations
- One deployment, many domains: each Site row has host bindings, so two domains can both own a
/frontpage.
- Portable
.idealist files move authored content (pages, settings, media, packages list) between environments.
- Media is stored on local disk or Azure Blob, chosen by config, always addressed as
/_media/{uid}.
- Sign-in through MindAttic.Authentication; credentials through MindAttic.Vault; passwordless managed identity in Azure.
Quick start
Prerequisites: the .NET 10 SDK, SQL Server LocalDB (the host falls back to (localdb)\MSSQLLocalDB database IdeaCms when no ConnectionStrings:IdeaCms is configured), and the machine-local MindAttic.Vault files described in docs/DEV_LOGIN.md.
git clone https://github.com/mindattic/IdeaCms.git
cd IdeaCms
dotnet build IdeaCms.slnx -c Debug
dotnet test src/IdeaCms.Tests/IdeaCms.Tests.csproj
dotnet run --project src/IdeaCms.Blazor
The host listens on https://localhost:7207 and http://localhost:5229 (Properties/launchSettings.json). Sign in at /login as admin with the Vault bootstrap token; you are forced to change the password on first sign-in (docs/DEV_LOGIN.md). Then open /admin to create pages and upload .idea files.
run.ps1 publishes a Release copy to C:\Apps\Ideas\ (served on http://localhost:5280) when source has changed, and is a fast no-op otherwise; run.ps1 -Force does a clean rebuild, and run.ps1 -Launch also starts it and opens the browser. The desktop shortcut points at C:\Apps\Ideas\run.bat, which opens a menu: 1) Deploy & Run runs run.ps1 -Force then launches, 2) Run launches the deployed copy (serve.bat) without redeploying. run.ps1 -LauncherOnly only rewrites the launchers.
How it works
A Page is free-form. A Theme wraps it. Plugins activate site-wide behaviour. Components drop into exact positions. Inline CSS and JS are yours.
This is the beginning of the README. Read the rest at the original. Read the full README ↗
