About CopilotCMS

This website isn't just a blog — it's also a live test of the software running underneath it. copilotcms.org is built on CopilotCMS, a free, open-source content management system built largely with the help of Microsoft Copilot, then hand-refactored to work exactly the way it's meant to.

Everything you see on this site — the articles, categories, media, layout — is managed through CopilotCMS. If you like how this site works, you can download the same software and build your own.

What it's built with

CopilotCMS is written in plain PHP and MySQL on the backend, with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript on the frontend — no frameworks, no external libraries. Just straightforward code, which makes it easy to read, modify, and self-host.

Key features

CopilotCMS comes with a dashboard covering everything needed to run a content-driven website:

  • Content — Articles (blog-style posts), standalone Pages, and Books (collections of articles)
  • Organization — Three ways to classify content: Content Types, Categories, and Tags
  • People — Authors (credited on articles), Workers (staff like graphics or proofreading contributors), and Users (CMS access)
  • Media — A central Media Library, plus dedicated Photo Gallery and YouTube Gallery tools
  • Layout control — Blocks that let you place content into specific template regions (header, footer, sidebars, above/below content, and more)
  • Settings — Site-wide key-value and fixed configuration options

Getting started

Setup is deliberately simple:

  1. Download the app from GitHub
  2. Upload it to your website's folder
  3. Run the provided MySQL database script
  4. Log in to the dashboard and start building
  5. To install it on localhost, we need to create a local domain first

Where it stands today

CopilotCMS is usable — this whole site is proof — but it's still under active development. The biggest thing to know before installing it: there's currently no built-in update mechanism. Once it's installed, it runs independently; if something needs fixing or a feature needs adding, that's on you (or whoever maintains the install). Think of it as a solid, hackable foundation rather than a polished, self-maintaining platform — at least for now.

License

CopilotCMS is released under the GNU General Public License v3.0, as noted on its GitHub page.

Get the code

You can download CopilotCMS, browse the source, and follow its progress on GitHub:

github.com/dinpk/copilot-cms