Features Overview

Straight out of the box, Manifesto is configured to provide you with all the tools to design and publish a basic site with static pages and a blog/news section.

A Manifesto Base installation includes:

• Built-in Admin, Editor, and User accounts for authentication
• Dated Posts module for blog or news posts
• The Template Pages module — with several flexible layout templates included — allows you to start building your pages right away.
• Navigation menus are generated automatically based on the modules installed and the page hierarchy you create for your site.

The CSS and layout structure for Manifesto's built-in templates is based on the Foundation framework, and uses only standard PHP rather than a templating language. jQuery is installed by default, and TinyMCE provides a WYSIWYG editor for content. Manifesto is designed to use SASS for managing and compiling modular CSS files, but ultimately you have full control over the loading of resources in your templates.

See our document Getting Started for more information about development.

Manifesto uses modules (like plugins) to provide compact functionality in standalone packages. You can add new functionality by installing and configuring new modules from dada typo, 3rd parties or your own developers.

Manifesto tracks the most recent module releases, and can update your existing modules from within the Administrative interface itself.

There are dozens of modules providing everything from toolbars for sharing to new content types and custom fields.

View available modules

We recognize that no codebase is an island, and Manifesto is designed to allow integrations from all kinds of third-party services, from embedding YouTube videos to connecting to credit card processors.

Many modules are created from the outset to act as bridges between Manifesto's content and external sites and services, like pulling recent images from your Instagram feed or showing the local weather on your home page. See the Add This module, or FontAwesome, or Matomo.

Smaller, easier integrations? Since you have full control over your page templates, any additional scripts or code snippets from outside sources can simply be embedded in the appropriate place in your templates. Just add the code they provide you, save the file, and off you go!

For developers, Manifesto offers modules for importing and integrating SlickPlan (a site-mapping tool), generating sample data with the Faker library, providing enhanced debugging, guarding against SQL injection and XSS attacks, or even batch importing and exporting data from different modules.

With only a PayPal or Stripe account, it's easy to set Manifesto up to take donations and contributions. Create a simple payment block that you can then embed on other pages, or drive users directly to a donation page.

For more complicated ecommerce needs, Manifesto has a clever shopping cart system designed to integrate with any content type available in Manifesto. In addition to a simple product database, Manifesto has distilled the needs of a shopping cart system into a core of properties that can be attached to any other content type, so you can set up a standard Photo Gallery in Manifesto, for example, and then configure the images to be available for purchase without having to re-enter data for each photo as a new item for sale. Think of it as "commodifying" your images, turning them into purchasable products. Like the rest of Manifesto, the Shopping Cart module is itself modular, supports multiple payment gateways like PayPal, Stripe, Authorize.Net or BluePay, and can be enhanced to support new gateways with minimal effort.

For more information, see the Shopping Cart module page.

Manifesto includes a bunch of SEO enhancements right out of the box. URLs crafted from customizable "shortnames" tailored to the content, optimized page titles, meta description tags based on your content: these are all built into Manifesto.

Additional schemas and microformat encoding is included in default templates from modules like the Event Calendar and the Newswire. And since you have full control over your templates, you can always add new or custom formats yourself.

Additional plugins allow for custom titles and descriptions based on specific URLs, the creation of web-based and XML Sitemaps for indexing by Google, and other functionality that can aid in the holistic enterprise of search engine optimization.

Manifesto integrates with both Google Analytics and, for the privacy-conscious, Matomo, to help you keep tabs on your site traffic, from popular pages to landing page conversions.

Google Analytics is the industry standard, and many marketing professionals have come to expect it on every site they work on. Manifesto provides an easy method for including the Google Analytics tracking code on your site, and providing you with a dashboard overview of the current analytics for your site.

Matomo (formerly Piwik) is another analytics software package, built on open source code. Rather than running in the cloud and sharing your data with Google for processing, Matomo collects and processes the data directly on your own server, or another server under your control. Data on your site hit counts and performance stays with you.

The editorial backend for Manifesto features a small popup panel in the lower-right corner that provides a quick interface for communicating with Manifesto support. It allows access to the Manifesto knowledge base, and can be used to generate a support ticket from right within your own website!

The widget sports a full WYSIWYG editor, the URL of the page you're on is automatically noted, you can attach files and even take a screenshot of the current page — automatically sent with your support request.