A Content Management System for the post-framework era
Upload a .idea package. It goes live.
No restart. No pipeline. No ceremony.
A CMS has exactly one job: connect content to presentation without getting in the way. That takes three things and nothing else.
One table. One row per page. No zones. No panes. No layout XML. A page is a slug,
a title, and a body that can embed widget tokens anywhere in the markup. The browser
<title> is its own standalone field.
That's it.
.idea zipA single archive: a compiled Blazor component, a CSS file scoped to a widget-specific class prefix, and JavaScript in an IIFE. Installed live with no redeploy. Versioned with a whole number — V1, V2, never 2.6.0.
Themes control typography, color, and the chrome around a page's body. They never touch the admin UI. They never own routes. A broken theme cannot lock you out of your site.
Compose a page by writing free-form HTML and dropping tokens wherever a widget should appear. No visual builder required. No drag-and-drop. No layout system.
A page body (authored in the admin editor):
<h2>Software Projects</h2> <Component.TabBoard /> <h2>Selected Work</h2> <Component.Gallery /> <!-- Pin a specific version: --> <Plugin.Tooltip.V2 /> <!-- Pass attributes to a widget: --> <Component.Hero title="Hello" />
Resolution rules:
.V2 suffix → that exact version, always[Parameter] properties.idea packageEvery widget is one file. Drop it in Admin → Upload and it is live within the same request cycle — no IIS restart, no config change, no app pool recycle.
MindAttic.Ideas.Component.TabBoard.V1.idea (zip) ├── idea.json │ { │ "key": "tabboard", │ "version": 1, │ "displayName": "Tab Board", │ "category": "Component" │ } ├── bin/ │ └── MindAttic.Ideas.Component.TabBoard.dll └── wwwroot/ ├── tabboard.css ← .ma-tabs-* (never leaks) └── tabboard.js ← (function(){ … })() (no globals)
/_ideas/Component/tabboard/1/.<Component.TabBoard /> resolves it on the next render — without touching the page record.DotNetNuke launched in 2003 and had a genuinely revolutionary idea: a CMS where every capability arrived as an installable zip package. Upload a module, it's live. No developer required. No deployment pipeline. No server access needed. They saw exactly what the web should be — and they were right.
But the technology of the era made clean execution impossible. WebForms required every module to participate in an elaborate page-event lifecycle. CSS had no isolation mechanism. JavaScript had no module system. And most fatally, the Skin system wrapped the entire page including the admin chrome. A broken skin meant you couldn't access your own admin panel to fix it. You were locked out of your own site.
The concept was correct. The execution was a prisoner of 2003.
MindAttic.Ideas revisits that vision with two decades of better tools. The installable package idea is intact. Everything else is solved:
.ma-tabs-* cannot affect .ma-footer-*| Feature | DNN | WordPress | Orchard Core | Umbraco | MindAttic.Ideas |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hot-install packages (no redeploy) | ✗ | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ |
| Free-form HTML pages (no zones or panes) | ✗ | ~ | ✗ | ~ | ✓ |
| CSS isolated per widget (no global leakage) | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ |
| JS isolated per widget (IIFE, no globals) | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ |
| Theme never wraps admin UI | ✗ | ~ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Token grammar for inline widget composition | ✗ | ~ shortcodes | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ |
| Per-page temporal history (every prior state recoverable) | ✗ | ~ revisions | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Modern .NET (Blazor server, .NET 10) | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ | ~ | ✓ |
| Bridge tables over JSON blobs for structured data | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ |
| Whole-number versioning (V1, V2 — never 1.5.11) | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ |
✓ = Yes · ✗ = No · ~ = Partial or with caveats
Every page row is system-versioned. Any prior state — including which widget versions it referenced — is recoverable. Wiki-like history with no separate history table.
No raw SQL in application code. Bridge tables everywhere — one row per fact, no JSON blobs for structured data. Migrations are additive and never destructive.
Each widget DLL loads in its own ALC, isolated from the host. Replacing a widget unloads the old DLL and loads the new one. The host process never restarts.
One interactive circuit. Every widget on a page shares it. No per-widget SignalR connection, no per-widget app pool. Interactive where needed, static where not.
Inline JavaScript only executes when the author holds the
Cms.AuthorRawMarkup claim. Untrusted HTML is
sanitized at render time. Trust is stamped at write time, not read time.
Every missing, disabled, or misconfigured widget surfaces a deduplicated alert in the admin inbox — the page degrades gracefully and the problem is never silent.
Admin → Pages → New Page. Set a slug and a title.
Type <Component.TabBoard /> into the body editor.
Admin → Upload → drop MindAttic.Ideas.Component.TabBoard.V1.idea.
The widget resolves on the next request. No restart. No cache clear. No config change.
A real Ideas install, not a video. Sign in as the admin, upload an .idea,
build a page, switch themes. It wipes itself and gets a brand-new password every hour, so break anything you like.
https://mindattic-ideas-demo.azurewebsites.net
Demo sign-in opens soon.