About
Hi, I’m Joe. I make Total CMS.
I’ve been building tools for web designers since 2009, and this is the one I’m proudest of. Here’s where it came from, what I care about, and how to reach me.
Who makes it
A designer-tools nerd, for a long time now.
Before Total CMS there was Weaver’s Space: more than 130 add-ons for Stacks and RapidWeaver, an online summit that’s now in its tenth year, and 700+ YouTube videos of me explaining things. That’s a lot of years spent with designers who build sites for clients, and Total CMS is what I learned from them.
So it answers the questions that come up after handover: how does the client edit this without breaking it, and who keeps it running? I write the code, ship the releases and answer the support email, from California, where I live with my wife Fran and our three kids.
On paper the company is Aspect Services, LLC, which also runs Weaver’s Space and the hosting company BetterSiteHost. In practice, you’ll be talking to me.
Where it came from
It started with one editable banner.
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2009
Weaver’s Space opens
Add-ons for Stacks and RapidWeaver, for designers who build sites for other people.
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2014
A Google Hangout and a rock climbing site
A customer wanted to let his son edit a banner on the son’s rock climbing business website. What I built him was just a form that edited a Markdown file on the server. That was the first Total CMS.
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2015
It takes off in Stacks
Total CMS ships and gets popular fast. Content lives as files on the site’s own server, with no database to set up or back up, and that has never changed. The blogging system turned out to be the powerful part, and it became the architecture Total CMS runs on today.
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2020
Third time’s the charm
Fun fact: Total CMS 2 never shipped. I built it and ran the Weaver’s Space website on it, and it was just too complicated to hand to anyone else. So I scrapped the whole thing and made the first commit of a from-scratch rewrite.
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2024
The rewrite goes public
A standalone PHP platform, released as a public beta anyone could install and poke at.
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2025
The rebuild ships
Its own admin, a Site Builder, a REST API, a command-line tool, and a built-in MCP server so AI agents can work on a site through the same rules as a human editor. Stacks became one way to use it, not the only way.
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Today
4,500+ licensed sites
As of August 2026, from yoga studios to newspaper associations, and a lot of design studios in between.
What I care about
A few things I won’t budge on.
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Your content stays on your server.
Everything is plain JSON files you can open in a text editor, copy with a file manager, or commit to git. Nothing leaves your host unless you send it somewhere.
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You buy it once.
A license is a one-time purchase per domain with two years of updates. After that it keeps running for as long as you want it to. No live site ever waits on a license check, and the trust page covers what happens if I get hit by a bus.
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Agents and people use the same door.
An AI agent editing your site goes through the same schemas, validation and access groups as a human editor. There’s no separate, weaker path for automation.
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The code is there to read.
Total CMS is source-available: the code is on GitHub and installs from Packagist, so you can see what runs on your server before you trust it.
Say hi
I read everything.
- Questions and ideas The community forum is the best place. Someone has often hit the same thing, and the answer stays around for the next person.
- Anything private Licensing, billing or pre-sales: email . The support page has everything else, including a license lookup.
- Writing about it The press kit has boilerplate, logos, screenshots and a longer bio.
Take it for a spin.
45 days, every Pro feature, no credit card. Build something real, and tell me what you think.