Total CMS 3 enters public beta

Total CMS 3 is a ground-up rewrite. Not a new version of the old codebase — a different program that happens to do the same job, built on PHP 8.2, Slim 4 and Twig 3.

Content lives in flat JSON files on your own server. There is no database to provision, no migration to run, and nothing that stops working because a hosting company retired a MySQL version. A collection is a folder. An object is a file. You can read either one with cat, copy a site by copying a directory, and keep a backup that is just files. The features page covers what that buys you day to day.

Describe your content once

The older way of working asked you to edit a page. This asks you to describe your content once — a schema — and then edit objects against it. A blog post has a title, a date, an image and a body because you said so, and every post gets the same form, the same validation and the same API without you building it three times.

Templates read that content through Twig. The admin generates its forms from the same schemas. Nothing is hardcoded to a page, which is why the same content can appear on a page, in a feed, and in an API response without being copied anywhere.

Eighteen months in the open

3.0 went public in May 2024 and stayed in beta for fifty releases while customers built real sites on it. That was the point: a rewrite that has never met production is a prototype. It shipped as 3.1 at the end of December 2025.

Total CMS has been shipping since September 2015. This is the third generation, and the first one designed around the idea that your content should outlive the tool that manages it. If you are weighing it against something else, the comparisons are honest about where each one wins.