FAQ

Not for building or running the site. A coding agent installs AtarCMS, builds it from your answers and walks you through launch, asking you before anything that needs your decision. Editing content afterwards happens in an admin made for people who are not programmers.

What you do need: a coding agent you can run (on your computer or with SSH access to a server), and some patience to answer its questions and review its work. A developer helps if you want custom features beyond what AtarCMS does out of the box.

AtarCMS itself is free: the core and the site skeleton are open source under the MIT licence, for any site, commercial ones included. What you build on it (your theme, your content) is yours.

You pay only for what you choose around it: hosting (one small VPS is enough), a domain, a mailbox for the forms' mail, and the coding agent you work with.

PHP 8.4 with the usual extensions (gd, intl, mbstring, pdo_mysql), MariaDB 10.11 or newer (MySQL 8 should work) and any web server. One small VPS is enough for a site with a few editors; Docker setups for development and production are included.

Installing works on your own computer (with or without Docker), on a server (Debian or Ubuntu, with or without Docker) and on shared hosting with SSH and PHP 8.4. There is no build step and no Node.js: the site boots from its sources on plain OPcache, and bin/atar doctor checks the result.

WordPress is a general platform with a huge ecosystem of themes and plugins. AtarCMS is deliberately small: one codebase for small multilingual sites with one to five trusted editors, without plugins to keep up to date.

• Made for agents: an agent skill to build the site, an admin guide for browser agents, /llms.txt and markdown twins for language models.
• Multilingual in the core: linked translations, per-language menus, search and feeds, full right-to-left in the site and the admin.
• Strict by default: a Content Security Policy with no inline scripts, no third-party code on the pages, a cookie banner only when you add counters.
• Content in code: content types and fields are defined in configuration, so an agent can read and change the site's structure safely in git.

If you need an online shop, a membership site or a thousand plugins, WordPress (or something else) fits better.

Everything the user it signs in as may do, through the same screens a person uses. The admin describes itself at /admin/ai-guide: the screens that user may open, every content type with its fields and limits, and how saving, autosave, translations and media work.

In practice an agent writes and translates entries, uploads pictures and sets their alt texts, edits menus and site settings, and reads the messages of the contact form. It cannot do more than its user: an author's agent edits only that author's drafts. Every change goes into the activity history with the user's name.

On your server. AtarCMS keeps content in your own MariaDB database and files in the site's storage/uploads/ folder; nothing is sent to us or to any cloud service. Backups are a database dump plus that folder, the site key and the .env file.

The site loads no third-party scripts or fonts. Statistics counters are off unless you add one, and then visitors are asked first.

No, not for running a site. AtarCMS's own code is MIT. The admin's rich-text editor is the GPL build of CKEditor 5, which ships with the core as a separate, unmodified component with its own licence files.

The GPL matters only if you redistribute AtarCMS itself together with the editor: then that redistribution must honour the GPL for that component. Running your site, and the theme and content you make, are not affected.