Introduction
FireCMS is an open source headless CMS and admin panel built by developers for developers.
It generates CRUD views based on your configuration. It is easy to set up for the straight forward cases and easy to extend and customise.
FireCMS does not enforce any data structure on your side, and works out of the box with any project.
The goal of this CMS is to generate collection and form views that bind nicely to the collection/document model. We have built in many basic (and not so basic) use cases; but FireCMS is built with extensibility in mind, so it is easy to create your custom form fields, or your complete views.
There are two ways to build top level views in FireCMS:
- By creating mapping configurations for collections (to datasource collections, such as Firestore collections) and schemas (to datasource entities, such as Firestore documents). The best way to get a grasp of how this works is checking the Quickstart, Collections and Entity schema documentation.
- Create custom views that sit in the main level of your navigation tree. In this case you can build your custom React component and make use of the internal components of the CMS as well as the provided hooks. Check Custom top level views for more details
FireCMS was built with Firebase/Firestore as the default backend, but nothing
stops you from implementing your own DataSource
, AuthController
and
StorageSource
and override the default implementations.
Core technologies
FireCMS is based on these great technologies:
- Typescript
- Firebase
- React
- React Router
- Material UI
- Formik + Yup
You can use this library as a full application, with routing enabled. But if you need better customisation and to use the internal components, tweak the MUI theme, control the routes or replace the backend altogether (including auth, storage and data), you can do it starting from version 1.0.0. Check the details in the Custom CMSApp section
Firebase
If Firebase is your chosen backend:
- You need to enable the Firestore database in your Firebase project.
- If you want to have authentication enabled in your CMS config, you need to enable the corresponding auth method in your project.
- Also, if you are using storage fields in your string properties, you need to enable Firebase Storage.
More details in Firebase setup section.
Deployment to Firebase hosting
If you are deploying this project to firebase hosting, and the app is properly
linked to it, you can omit the firebaseConfig
specification, since it gets
picked up automatically.
More details in the deployment section
Features
FireCMS has been meticulously built to make it extremely easy for developers to build a CMS/admin tool. At the same time it offers the best data editing experience and has an extremely thoughtful UX designed to make it super easy to use, for marketers and content managers.
🏓 Awesome spreadsheet view
We have developed a super performant windowed spreadsheet view for collections, where you can do inline editing on most of the common fields, and have a popup view in the rest of the cases and your custom field implementations.
It has real-time support, making it suitable for apps that need to be always updated.
It also supports text search (through an external provider such as Algolia, if you are using Firestore), as well as filtering and sorting and exporting data
✨ Powerful forms
When editing an entity, FireCMS offers a nested system of side dialogs that allow to navigate through subcollections and access custom views (such as a custom form, or a blog preview).
FireCMS includes more than 15 built-in fields with hundreds of customization and validation options. The components have been meticulously crafted for a great user experience, and we include advanced features such as references to other collections, markdown or arrays reordering.
If your use case is not supported, you can build your own custom field, just as any other React component.
It also supports conditional fields in forms, allowing for declaring rules of what fields are active , based on your own logic.
👮 Authentication, permissions and role system
You will be able to define which navigation views can a user see, and the operations (create, edit, delete) that can be executed on them, based on your role system. You can even define this configuration on a per-entity or collection level.
By default, all the authorization mechanisms of Firebase are supported, but you are free to implement your own.
🏹 Relational support
You can define references to entities in other collections, and benefit from the integrated reference fields and shortcuts included.
It is also possible to define subcollections at the entity level, so you can nest data in a collection/document/collection model
🆒 Real time data
Every view in the CMS has real time data support. This makes it suitable for displaying data that needs to be always updated.
Forms also support this feature, any modified value in the database will be updated in any currently open form view, as long as it has not been touched by the user. This allows for advanced cases where you trigger a Cloud Function after saving an entity that modifies some values, and you want to get real time updates.
🗂️ Files storage
FireCMS supports uploading files to Firebase Storage out of the box, and provides specific fields for handling single and multiple file uploads, also allowing for reordering.
You can change the Firebase Storage implementation with your own.
🙌 Your logic
You can add your custom logic or validation in multiple points of the user flow.
There are built-in hooks onPreSave
, onSaveSuccess
, onSaveFailure
,
onPreDelete
and onDelete
.
FireCMS has a good separation of concerns. All the logic related to
Firebase/Firestore is abstracted away behind 3 interfaces: DataSource
,
StorageSource
and AuthDelegate
. This means you can extend or even completely
replace those 3 implementations with your own.