Locomotive

Locomotive is an open source platform to create, publish and edit sites (CMS). It is designed to save time and help you focus on what matters: front-end technology, standard development process and a very low learning curve for your clients.

Locomotive relies on a very original workflow:

Sites are coded locally using our open source tool: Wagon. A desktop version (not open source and not tested in v3) is also available here.
Sites are deployed to the platform (engine) thanks to our internal API.
A back-office for the end-users is automatically generated based on the custom models and editable regions described by the developers.

Locomotive

Visit the Locomotive official website here for more information.

Features

Multi-sites natively supported
Uses Liquid, a simple and clean templating language
Easy to add custom content types, no SQL needed
Beautiful and intuitive editing interface
Can fully localize all the content and pages
Embed a Restful API to manage every site
Develop and preview sites locally with your favorite tools (Wagon)
Support for SASS, HAML and Coffee Script (Wagon)

Instructions and help

Documentation
Get help with Locomotive or discuss technical issues on Gitter or here.
Follow us on twitter

Contribute

V3 has launched! Which means a lot of stuff changed and we got bunch of new features shipped in. However, Locomotive will be updated frequently with more awesome features. Have a look at our Trello board to see what's next or see where you can help out.

Technologies

Here is a list of the main gems used to power the Locomotive platform:

Rails 4.2 - web framework
Bootstrap - UI framework
Mongoid 5 - Object-Document-Mapper for MongoDB 2/3
Devise 3.4 - Authentication
Carrierwave - Upload
Pundit - Permissions

Translating the back-office

By default, the Locomotive back-office is fully translated in English, Dutch and Greek.

Adding a new language is pretty straightforward since we now manage all our I18n translation keys in Transifex, a platform dedicated to this kind of task.

Here is our Transifex portal page: https://www.transifex.com/locomotive/locomotive-engine. Feel free to sign up and translate!

How to contribute

Locomotive is an open source project, we encourage contributions. If you have found a bug and want to contribute a fix, or have a new feature you would like to add, follow the steps below to get your patch into the project:

Install ruby, mongoDB and phantomjs
Clone the project git clone [email protected]:locomotivecms/engine.git
Setup a virtual host entry for test.example.com to point to localhost
Start mongodb if it is not already running
Run the tests bundle exec rake
Write your failing tests
Make the tests pass
Create a GitHub pull request

For new features (especially large ones) it is best to create a topic on the Google group first to make sure it fits into the goals of the project.

Contact

Feel free to contact me at did at locomotivecms dot com.