Boxlet CMS Reviews and Details

Questions & Answers

1. Why should a person choose Boxlet CMS over its competitors?

   • No plugins needed: design, multilingual, forms, statistics, SEO, redirects and backups are built in and work together.
   • Runs anywhere: PHP 8.1 and MySQL, MariaDB or SQLite on shared hosting; FTP and a browser are enough.
   • Privacy by default: no cookies for visitors, statistics on your own server, form messages stored only if you choose.
   • AI translation with your own key: a whole site into another language, menus and forms included. The 14-page demo into Croatian cost about 30 cents.
   • Fast without tuning: next to no JavaScript, a page cache and modern image formats; 100 on PageSpeed on desktop.
   • Free and open source under the MIT licence, with no paid edition.

2. How would you describe the primary audience of Boxlet CMS?

   Freelancers, small studios and agencies who build and look after many small websites: a café, a practice, a studio, a local business, a small cultural venue. People who want each site to look designed, be quick to set up on cheap hosting, and need little care afterwards, without maintaining a stack of plugins for every client.

3. Which are the primary technologies used for building Boxlet CMS?

   • PHP 8.1+, with no framework, and only six libraries: FastRoute, phpdotenv, Symfony Mailer, Monolog, OTPHP and Bacon QR Code
   • MySQL, MariaDB or SQLite through PDO, with portable migrations
   • TipTap for the rich-text editor; otherwise small vanilla JavaScript
   • CSS custom properties compiled from the design settings
   • Quality: PHPStan at level 8, about 1,700 tests on both databases, CI on PHP 8.1 to 8.4, and Opengrep security rules on every change

4. What's the story behind Boxlet CMS?

   Boxlet comes from building small websites for years and never finding the right tool for them. The big systems needed a pile of plugins and constant updates for a five-page site; the small ones looked like templates. Two earlier attempts at a CMS of my own stalled at the same place: making the design layer good enough.

   So Boxlet started from the other end. The design layer came first, and everything else was kept boring and small. It was built step by step against a written specification, with every feature tested on both MySQL and SQLite, and released as v0.1.0 in October 2026.

5. What makes Boxlet CMS unique?

   Its design layer. Instead of a theme you fight with, Boxlet has 21 design sets that change how pages are composed (spacing, rhythm, sections, typography), not just their colours, and every choice is previewed live. A small site ends up looking designed rather than like a template with the logo swapped.

   It is also deliberately small: everything a small site needs is built in (pages, pictures, languages, forms, statistics, SEO, backups), and it installs from one ZIP on ordinary shared hosting, with no shell, Composer or build step.