BEdita is an open source web development framework that features a Content Management System (CMS) out-of-the-box. Current version is 3.1.5, released on 5 March 2012 under Affero General Public License version 3. A preview and “unstable” version is also available: 3.2.beta populus, released on 5 March 2012 under the same GPL license. BEdita is built upon the PHP development framework CakePHP.
BEdita is both a content management system and a web development framework. In the words of the authors, BEdita is a “modular framework that features a back-end Content Management System out-of-the-box”.
BEdita is built upon the well-known PHP development framework CakePHP: as a framework itself, BEdita actually extends CakePHP adding many features through more controllers and helpers and the Smarty templating engine. It also combines some presentation technologies, such as JQuery, with the aim to supply a set of ready to use tools. From CakePHP BEdita derives the model-view-controller paradigm: the multi-tier architecture assures the separation of data modeling, data flow / control and its visual presentation. Inside BEdita every information is stored in an object oriented manner. On this abstraction, the developer can build as many custom as needed by the project.
BEdita is also a complete content management system, since it comes with a multi-language back office application, able to manage several types of data: the CMS presents a number of modules, each related to a type of content. It is able to handle documents, multimedia objects and galleries, events, news, address books, blogs, bibliographies, newsletters and more out of the box. Hierarchic tree, custom categories and tags.
For major release 3, BEdita has been rewritten from the ground up: all the previous versions have not been available under an open source license. The very first public release of a version 3 “beta” took place in May 2009. On 17 November 2009 a stable version of BEdita – 3.0 codename Betula – was released under Affero General Public License version 3, openly downloadable on the official web site www .bedita.com and some common open source online networks (Sourceforge, Freshmeat or Ohloh). BEdita has been created by ChannelWeb srl and Chialab srl.