In 2012 Sirius CMS was a promising open-source WordPress alternative built by Turkish developers. Fourteen years on, here’s where the project ended up — and where the Turkish open-source CMS scene stands today.
Original post (2012, translated):
Sirius CMS is a WordPress-style open-source content management system — admin panel + blog frontend — being actively developed by a Turkish developer. Free and web-based.
Why Sirius CMS?
- Open source and free.
- Multi-site management from a single panel.
- SML (Sirius Markup Language) for fast, easy development.
- Foundation is SEO and AdSense friendly.
- Custom link structures, custom content areas for ads.
- Advanced stats with Google Analytics API integration.
- Error reporting system.
- Automatic sitemap and RSS generation.
- File and SQL caching so big sites don’t lose performance.
Watch the video below for installation instructions.
Sirius CMS in 2026
Sirius CMS long since stopped active development. This is a common arc in software: projects sustained by one developer / small team gradually go dormant once the founder loses interest or focuses on a job.
Sirius CMS’s official site and repo are offline or inactive. Other Turkish open-source CMS projects met similar fates:
- Sirius CMS → dormant
- mTcms → archive
- iCMS → archive
- Various vBulletin / phpBB Turkish forks → mostly gone
2026 — The Open-Source CMS Landscape
Turkish developers today contribute to global ecosystems instead of writing local CMSes. A typical 2026 stack looks like:
- WordPress still dominates with 43%+ market share. Practically default in Turkey.
- Ghost: publishing-focused, modern. Substack’s self-hosted alternative.
- Astro / Next.js: “headless” approach — CMS in the back, separate frontend.
- Strapi (France) / Payload CMS: headless CMS APIs.
- Hugo / Jekyll: static-site generators — ideal for small blogs.
- Notion / Obsidian + Quartz: note-takers turned into blogs.
What Sirius CMS Left Behind in Turkey
Sirius CMS may look like a failure, but it played an important role in seeding open-source software culture in Turkey between 2010-2014:
- First PHP backend experience for many high-school/uni students.
- Community-building practice via Turkish forums and IRC.
- Early Turkish project pushes to GitHub.
Developers who worked on Sirius CMS (and others around it) today contribute to projects like GitHub, Mozilla, Vercel, Hugging Face — Sirius CMS was their starting point.
If I Were Writing a CMS in 2026
- TypeScript + Next.js + Drizzle ORM + Postgres.
- Auth: Clerk or self-hosted Lucia.
- Editor: Tiptap or Lexical.
- Deploy: Vercel + Neon Postgres.
- AI editor: integrate OpenAI API for writing suggestions, title generation, categorization.
