Talea
A self-hosted website builder for small businesses and freelancers: pages, news,
a visual page builder whose output reads like hand-written HTML, forms and enquiries, an AI assistant, Claude over MCP,
and a WordPress importer. You own the site, the data and the server.
Talea is a hard fork of Kaleta, the open-source CMS by Miroslav Kaleta
(@phprscms) and contributors – source at
phprs-cms/kaletacms. The page builder, the design system, MCP, the WordPress
importer and nearly everything under Features are their work. Talea branched off at Kaleta 3.7.0 in
October 2026, keeps the whole history and goes its own way since: What Talea changes.
Looking for FTP hosting with updates installed from the admin? Use Kaleta.
Features
All of these come from Kaleta; Talea keeps and maintains them.
- Page builder – the canvas is the real page. Drag elements and ready-made sections into place, style them separately
for desktop, tablet, mobile and hover. Drafts save continuously and go live only when you publish; older versions can be restored.
- Library of 40 ready-made sections (heroes, services, pricing, testimonials, team, gallery, contact with a form…) and
three starter sites at installation. Texts follow the page language.
- Design system – one-click styles, colours with a readability (WCAG) check, dark mode, fonts, fluid sizes and spacing –
all tokens, so changing a colour restyles the whole site.
- Site parts – header, footer and wrappers for the news item, news list and 404 page in the builder, including
variants for selected pages (a landing page without navigation).
- Pop-ups – windows, slide-in panels and bars built in the builder, with triggers (time, scrolling, exit intent,
idle time, page count), rules by page, language, period, device and campaign, and cookie-free views and conversions.
- Components – reusable blocks with properties; editing a component updates it everywhere.
- Collections – custom content types (testimonials, team, products, branches…) with their own fields, listed in the
builder with
{{field}} tags, filters, sorting and pagination, and item pages with a builder template.
- Forms and enquiries – an enquiry form without CAPTCHA or cookies, enquiries in the admin, email notifications,
CSV export and automatic deletion of personal data.
- Newsletter – double opt-in sign-up; send your latest news in an e-mail styled by the design system (through SMTP),
or pass confirmed subscribers to Brevo, MailerLite, Mailchimp, Ecomail, SmartEmailing or any service via a webhook.
- Company details – address, company ID, opening hours and map once in Settings; the site shows them and search
engines get LocalBusiness structured data.
- AI – the assistant drafts a new section from a description, rewrites element text, suggests headlines, SEO
descriptions, proofreading and translation (Claude, OpenAI, Google Gemini or Mistral). Claude can also build the site
over MCP: it turns HTML into builder content and edits site parts, collections and the design – always as a draft to approve.
- News (blog), sites in around forty languages, SEO and llms.txt, cookie-free analytics, redirects, backups,
WordPress import (straight into the builder, too).
What Talea changes
Kaleta is a CMS for business websites that installs over FTP and updates itself. Talea aims at a self-hosted website builder
for small businesses and freelancers, runs as a container and adds the pieces that goal needs. The reasoning
behind each decision is in docs/DECISIONS.md.
The foundation
| Kaleta | Talea |
|---|
| Installation | ZIP upload to PHP hosting, then install.php | Docker-first: a container image (FrankenPHP), configuration from environment variables, one install per site |
| Updates | The site downloads and installs signed packages from the admin | No in-app updater and no update check; an update is a new image (docker compose pull) |
| PHP | 8.3+ | 8.5+ |
| Database | MySQL 8 / MariaDB 10.6+ | MySQL 8, MariaDB 11.4+, PostgreSQL 18 or SQLite (one file, no server, for a small site) – the same code on all of them, through a small dialect layer |
| Schema | schema.sql | Phinx migrations, applied by bin/migrate (installer, container start, tests), never on a page request |
| Names in code | Czech names in code, tables, routes and stored values | English everywhere; Czech is one of the translations |
| Ids at the boundary | Integer row ids | UUID v4 public_id in admin URLs, MCP, previews, webhooks and exports |
| Tests | Shell walk (tools/test.sh) and a check harness | PHPUnit and ParaTest (unit, integration, whole installed sites), a browser walk, both database engines. Composer is used for these tools only |
MariaDB needs version 11.4 or newer: 10.x lacks the collation utf8mb4_0900_ai_ci that the schema uses, and the installer says so.
Added in Talea
- Looks gallery – 14 finished looks (design system, header and footer, recommended sections), each tried on the real
site before it is applied. Kaleta deliberately had no style presets.
- Font library – about 28 open-source families, mirrored and self-hosted (see docs/FONTS.md).
- Visual composing on the canvas – spacing, size and column dividers dragged directly on the page, and a Compose
section with a 12-column grid and layers (docs/specs/visual-compose.md).
- Onboarding – three first-run questions (topic, features, how to start) that lead to the looks or to the AI wizard.
- AI inside the admin – a first-run wizard and an Ask box in the builder, with the owner's own key; drafts only,
every run can be undone.
- A/B tests – variants of pages, sections or elements with goals and a "promote winner" step.
- Member login – visitor accounts with e-mailed links, groups, and pages, collection items and news restricted to them.
- Structured data element – schema.org markup in the builder, checked before publishing.
- Add-on API v2 with three bundled add-ons, off by default: domain watch, firewall, client galleries.
Removed or switched off
- Whistleblowing is removed.
- The in-app updater, its signing keys and the fleet console's staged updates are removed (see above).
- The firewall's blocklists, country and network blocks moved from the core into an add-on.
- The notice board is off by default (offered for the municipality blueprint only).
Kaleta changes after the fork
Talea merges nothing from upstream. Changes in Kaleta after 3.7.0 are read, filed as issues and re-implemented in Talea's
style (English names, migrations, public ids, portable SQL). Ported so far, through Kaleta 3.11.0: shared addresses per
language, WordPress multilingual import, Arabic and right-to-left pages, regional language versions, the MCP Essentials tool
set, placeholders instead of invented sample content, drafts by default, a server clock check and security fixes. The ideas
behind them are Kaleta's.
Principles
The first five are Kaleta's and stay; the last one is Talea's.
- Simple code: plain PHP, no framework, no ORM, no build step; no third-party plugins.
- Clean output: one builder element = one HTML tag, CSS only for what the page uses, in cascade layers (
@layer);
JavaScript only where it is really needed. Tests enforce it.
- Web 2026: fluid type and spacing, container queries, OKLCH colours (
color-mix), the Popover API, view transitions.
- AI as a first-class user: whatever works in the editor works over MCP – same schema, validation and permissions.
- Privacy and accessibility by default: no third-party scripts or fonts, colour contrast checks.
- One container per site: configuration in the environment, updates by image, migrations before the site starts.
Quick start (Docker)
# set TALEA_DB_PASSWORD and TALEA_SITE_URL in docker-compose.yaml (or in your environment)
docker compose up -d # then open http://localhost:8080: the installer asks for the site and the administrator
The stack is Talea on FrankenPHP plus MySQL 8.4; configuration comes from environment variables, updates are a new image
(the entrypoint applies pending migrations). All variables and volumes: docker/README.md.
Other ways to run it (hosting, reverse proxy, backups): docs/DEPLOYMENT.md.
Development
export DEV_UID=$(id -u) DEV_GID=$(id -g)
docker compose -f docker-compose-dev.yaml up -d --build # code mounted from the checkout, mail catcher, Adminer
composer test # PHPUnit: unit, integration against MySQL, whole installed sites
composer test:unit runs the fast checks (no database), php tools/contracts.php shows changes of the public contracts (MCP tools,
design tokens, builder elements), static analysis is PHPStan. How to contribute: CONTRIBUTING.md;
architecture notes for contributors and agents: CLAUDE.md.
Documentation
Licence and credits
GNU GPL version 2 or later; the licence text is in LICENSE.
Talea is built on Kaleta by Miroslav Kaleta and the Kaleta contributors, whose commits are kept in this repository's
history. The attribution and the copyright of both projects are in NOTICE. If Talea is useful to you, consider
supporting the original project as well: Kaleta on GitHub.
