Introduction

FireCMS is an open source headless CMS and admin panel built by developers for developers.

warning

FireCMS 2.0 has been replaced by FireCMS 3.0. We encourage you to migrate to the new version at this point. The collections generated in FireCMS Cloud are synced automatically to the new version, but not to versions 2.2 or below.

FireCMS is a content management system (CMS) that is built on top of the Firebase platform. It is a cloud-based system that allows users to manage and publish content to their websites or applications. With FireCMS, users can create and edit pages, upload and manage media files, and manage users and permissions. FireCMS is designed to be easy to use and can be integrated with other Firebase services, such as Firebase Authentication and Firebase Cloud Functions, to provide additional features and functionality.

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, with your schema). The best way to get a grasp of how this works is checking the Quickstart and Collections 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

Custom backend

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.

FireCMS works as a complete app that is in charge of creating the views that you define based on your collections and entity schemas. It handles navigation for you as well as authentication and login.

However, there is a lot of room to customization, including custom top level views, custom entity views, and custom fields for your entity properties, in case the basic use cases we include don't suit your needs.

In the simplest case, you will want to create some properties, include them in an entity collection, include it in a collection and include that in a CMS instance.

FirebaseCMSApp

The entry point for setting up a FireCMS app based on Firebase is the FirebaseCMSApp. This component is in charge of building a full FireCMS instance, using Firebase Auth, Firestore, and Firebase Storage as backend services.

Internally it will create a FireCMS which holds the main state and logic of the app, and create the app scaffold and routes.

note

It is also possible to use FireCMS by using lower level components and including FireCMS in your code, even without using Firebase. More details in the Custom CMSApp section

You can find an example of a basic FirebaseCMSApp implementation in the quickstart section

Core technologies

FireCMS is based on these great technologies:

• Typescript
• Firebase
• React
• React Router
• Material UI
• Formik + Yup

important

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 crafted to make it incredibly easy for developers to build a CMS/admin tool while offering an excellent data editing experience and a user-friendly interface for marketers and content managers.

🏓 Exceptional Spreadsheet View

We've developed a highly efficient windowed spreadsheet view for collections, allowing inline editing for most common fields, as well as popup views for other cases and your custom field implementations.

Featuring real-time support, FireCMS is perfect for apps that require constant updates. It also supports text search (through an external provider like Algolia, if using Firestore), filtering and sorting, and exporting data.

✨ Robust Forms

When editing an entity, FireCMS offers a nested system of side dialogs for navigating through subcollections and accessing custom views (such as custom forms or blog previews). This functionality can also be accessed programmatically using the useSideEntityController hook.

FireCMS includes over 15 built-in fields with numerous customization and validation options. The components have been carefully designed for an outstanding user experience, including advanced features like references to other collections, markdown, and array reordering.

For unsupported use cases, create your own custom field as a React component.

FireCMS also supports conditional fields in forms, allowing you to define rules for active fields based on your logic.

👮 Authentication, Permissions, and Role System

Define which navigation views users can see and the operations (create, edit, delete) they can perform based on your role system. You can even configure this on a per-entity or collection level.

By default, FireCMS supports all Firebase authorization mechanisms, but you can implement your own.

🏹 Relational Support

Define references to entities in other collections and benefit from the integrated reference fields and shortcuts.

You can also define subcollections at the entity level for nesting data in a collection/document/collection model.

🆒 Real-Time Data

Every view in the CMS supports real-time data, making it suitable for displaying constantly updated information.

Forms also support this feature, with any modified value in the database being updated in any open form view as long as it hasn't been touched by the user. This enables advanced cases where a Cloud Function is triggered after saving an entity, modifying some values, and requiring real-time updates.

🗂️ File Storage

FireCMS supports uploading files to Firebase Storage out of the box and provides specific fields for handling single and multiple file uploads, as well as reordering.

You can replace the Firebase Storage implementation with your own.

🙌 Custom backend

FireCMS has a good separation of concerns. All the logic related to Firebase/Firestore is abstracted away behind 3 interfaces: DataSource, StorageSource and AuthController. This means you can extend or even completely replace those 3 implementations with your own.