About

The goal of Manifesto has always been to empower users to have control over their websites. It should be easy for content editors to do their job (without needing to be technically proficient), and it should be open and flexible for developers to build and extend.

There are many excellent, many even open source, solutions for building websites. For the non-technical with simple needs, drag-and-drop site builders like SquareSpace or Wix might be good enough. WordPress is, of course, nearly ubiquitous, but it usually trades customization for ease-of-use, or trades efficient structure in order to offer customization. Laravel is a great and very flexible framework, but relies heavily on command-line development and offers no built-in backend interface.

In contrast to the feature set, here's an overview of the types of projects that Manifesto excels at:

Collections of structured data

Collections of things, from blog posts or press releases to photos to antiques or concert events. Manifesto is designed to create data structures that are unique to your data, which allows it to create efficient searchable, sortable, and filterable repositories of information.

Customized workflows/Online contests

Because Manifesto employs a basic Model-View-Controller style paradigm, it's easy to create customized page flows for your site. For example, building an online, multi-step contest application is easily in Manifesto's wheelhouse, and the flow of Manifesto's Shopping Cart module is a great example of building a sequential process on your website.

Online Publications

Independent media organizations, small magazines, the independent press. Manifesto was originally designed for community news publishing, and there are modules for magazine issues, content moderation and voting, and a built-in comments module that avoids the need for allowing a third-party commenting system onto your site.

Full template customization

Both the core element templates and all of the templates for add-on modules can be overridden at the local level, giving you precise control over the look and feel of every aspect of your site.


The History of Manifesto

Manifesto was born around the year 2000, before the era of WordPress, before blogging and social media. Originally known as dadaIMC, it was developed as a framework for online publishing to be used in the service of citizen journalism as part of the Indymedia network. It was used across the US, and in countries all over the world, localized in English, Japanese, Arabic, Hebrew, Greek, and Turkish.

Since then, Manifesto has grown into a full-blown, flexible content management system, with modules capable of providing a broad range of functionality: from event calendars to e-commerce, summer camp registrations to course catalogs. Right out of the box, you have everything you need to set up a basic site for yourself, your non-profit, your project or your business.

Manifesto is an open source project - the full source code for the Manifesto core is freely available and open to community contributions. See our developer pages for more information.