The CMS framework Alchemy CMS was first published in 2007, and has been free to use under the BSD licence since 2010. It’s being developed further by the Hamburg-based software company magic labs and by the large community of users of the pro­gram­mer platform GitHub.

Alchemy CMS is an open source project that’s built using the web ap­plic­a­tion framework Ruby on Rails, meaning that unlike the majority of its com­pet­it­ors, it employs the pro­gram­ing language Ruby. This gives the modular CMS a high level of flex­ib­il­ity and security, enabling it to be used in a variety of projects. All the elements can be con­figured to meet the re­quire­ments of any project, and the system can be extended with thousands of free-to-use RubyGems. You can host Alchemy CMS on any server that supports Ruby on Rails, the database SQL, and Im­ageMa­gick.

Flexible and user friendly – Alchemy CMS

Since Alchemy CMS should be thought of as less of a tra­di­tion­al content man­age­ment system, and more of an extension of the Ruby on Rails framework, ex­per­i­enced pro­gram­mers will find that there’s prac­tic­ally no bound­ar­ies or lim­it­a­tions to in­teg­rat­ing it. Every in­di­vidu­al element can be con­figured to fit and ad­di­tion­al modules can be installed ef­fort­lessly. In this way, you can quickly connect Alchemy CMS to a shop system or any other web ap­plic­a­tion. Web de­velopers can also add in­di­vidu­al data sources like mem­ber­ship lists or product cata­logues into the system, which the editors can then access and process. Along with the benefits listed above, Alchemy CMS offers the following ad­di­tion­al ad­vant­ages:

  • Strict sep­ar­a­tion of layout and content
  • Interface designed for the user
  • Easy im­ple­ment­a­tion of different formats due to flexible storage
  • User roles with different rights and re­stric­tions
  • Page layout can be stored in cache

Many similar systems store layout structure and text format­ting together in a shared database, which can make op­tim­isa­tion of content for different screen sizes un­ne­ces­sar­ily com­plic­ated. This is where the Alchemy CMS de­vel­op­ment team takes a different approach, pro­gram­ming the CMS in such a way that im­ple­men­ted content is stored sep­ar­ately from layout-specific sizes and so can be expanded for different screen size formats very easily.

While website de­velopers can design different elements freely and are only limited by their level of expertise and by the project re­quire­ments, the options for editors who work on this CMS are de­lib­er­ately limited. This is because the whole idea behind Alchemy CMS is to allow in­ex­per­i­enced users to focus entirely on the content of the website, leaving the chal­lenges of pro­gram­ming and designing to the expert de­velopers. Meanwhile, thanks to the ‘Live Preview’ function, you can always check how your new content will appear on your website. In the user accounts man­age­ment section, the system ad­min­is­trat­or has the option of creating in­di­vidu­al accounts with cus­tom­ised access rights.

The most important Alchemy CMS features explained

The different options for creation and con­fig­ur­a­tion on this content man­age­ment system make Alchemy CMS a worthy al­tern­at­ive to popular coun­ter­parts like WordPress, Typo3, or Joomla. Thanks to the un­der­ly­ing framework, the CMS can also be used as an admin backend, for example for mobile apps. Besides the ad­vant­ages already mentioned, this open source software also includes the following features:

  • Mul­ti­lin­gual function: you can manage several different versions of the same page in one Alchemy CMS in­stall­a­tion, allowing you to run a mul­ti­lin­gual website with different domains.
  • Support of tags: you can create tags to summarise related topics, allowing you to sort your articles in a more dynamic way
  • First class image pro­cessing and man­age­ment: with help from the image pro­cessing plugin Dragonfly, Alchemy CMS auto­mat­ic­ally formats your images, photos, and graphics. Al­tern­at­ively, you can also take care of the rendering manually. Dragonfly makes use of the proven image pro­cessing tool Im­ageMa­gick, available via the Ruby library, RMagick. Ad­di­tion­ally, all images are saved in cache during pro­cessing.
  • Multiple file upload: you can com­fort­ably upload several image files onto the server sim­ul­tan­eously and sort them with a drag-and-drop tool. This makes it easy for users to create large image galleries without having to transfer each image in­di­vidu­ally.
  • Full text search: you can search Alchemy CMS for pages or tags, with help from the high-per­form­ance search engine Ferret

What does Alchemy CMS have to offer for SEO?

Along with the editing of classic SEO elements like titles and meta de­scrip­tions, the system supports search engine op­tim­isa­tion, and if you change the address of a page, it will auto­mat­ic­ally generated re­dir­ec­tion. You’ve also got the option to bolster your content man­age­ment system with extra SEO tools by browsing the big selection of Ruby plugins (known as Ruby Gems). The following ex­ten­sions are par­tic­u­larly popular on Alchemy CMS:

  • seo_meta: This is the most popular plugin for meta tags when it comes to Ruby on Rails.
  • acts_more_seo: This extension has a special feature that ensures all page URLs are SEO friendly
  • seo_fuel: Thanks to this Ruby Gem, you can configure SEO settings for every in­di­vidu­al page of your project

Running an online shop with Alchemy CMS

Although you can’t create and operate a fully func­tion­ing e-commerce site using the standard modules available on Alchemy CMS, there are a number of suitable plugins for this. For example, by in­stalling shoppe, you can access all the tools you need to run a simple but complete online store – including modules for products, product cat­egor­ies, orders, and credit card payments. Shop_bunny features a shopping cart function and a coupon function for business-building discount offers. Al­tern­at­ively, you could opt for spree or nimbleShop as other choices for your online shop plugin. These plugins have ad­di­tion­al ex­ten­sions that can support PayPal trans­ac­tions.

Other in­ter­est­ing Ruby ex­ten­sions

There are some other im­press­ive and useful Ruby on Rails ex­ten­sions on rubygems.org that can be used to increase the range of functions offered by your Alchemy CMS in­stall­a­tion. Here’s a selection of our favorites:

  • xforum: A forum with a drop-down menu for mul­ti­lin­gual com­munit­ies (requires JavaS­cript)
  • google-geo: An extension that allows you to display map data collected from the Google Maps API

Summary: easy to program and easier still to use

If you like to work with the pro­gram­ming language Ruby, and you’re already familiar with Ruby on Rails, then you’ll have no problems at all getting started with Alchemy CMS. The sim­pli­city that has made Ruby popular is also clear to see on this open source system – you can easily create anything, from small projects like blogs, to large-scale company websites in next to no time at all. And Alchemy CMS is designed to be just as simple and intuitive for editors as it is for pro­gram­mers. The task-oriented interface and easy content im­ple­ment­a­tion makes it straight­for­ward for in­ex­per­i­enced users to add great content to their website. You can find the latest version of the content man­age­ment system, including in­struc­tions for in­stall­a­tion and con­fig­ur­a­tion, on GitHub.

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