BardCanvas is a Multi-purpose engine and Content Management System based on the LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) authored by LAVA SoftWorks and released to the world as Open Source.

A CMS like many others, but with a difference: designed thinking a bit out of the box

It works like most CMSs out on the wild, and though it is heavily influenced by WordPress, it has several differences in its design. For instance:

• It is built from the ground up with optimization in mind, so you can throw it at a very small VPS server and receive a relatively high traffic load without bringing the server down to its knees.

• It is faster and consumes a lot less RAM. Putting latest post comments in your blog indexes is unthinkable on some CMSs because of the huge amount of calls to database tables and those megs and megs of memory taken to build everything. Caching becomes handy, at the cost of a payload of thousands of objects in either your memcache or disk. This doesn't happen with BardCanvas Blog modules. Building an index page with the latest comments takes around 16 database queries and eats up less than 12MB. And when using memcache, numbers go a lot below those.

• It uses many Open Source frameworks and utilities that most Web Developers know: jQuery, jQuery-UI, FontAwesome, TinyMCE and CodeMirror just to mention a few.

• It uses a templating system that is easy to understand and implement.

• All modules are made with extensibility in mind, so developers can extend or reuse modules authored by other developers.

• It has an integrated interface, so administrative pages look similar to regular pages, reducing the confusion caused by separate templates.

• It has an universal settings editor, so all settings of the engine and all modules are found in a single place.

• It has several cache levels that are used according their relevance. Content segments and database objects are kept apart and constantly refreshed without affecting users. Caching entire pages is avoided at all costs.

• It doesn't collapse the server in high traffic circumstances, and registered users don't have to wait for minutes to login or browse with an open session.

• It can be clustered without changes, just by setting a couple of variables in the configuration file.

• All code is easy to understand. Developers will love using some modules as template for their own creations.

• It can be automatically updated by simply setting up cron job 

Fully featured

There is a bundle you can download and install. It includes the next elements:

• BardCanvas Core 1.14.9.22 (Core and basics)
• BardCanvas Requirements Library 1.2.5 (Core and basics)
• Accounts Module 1.24.11 (Core and basics)
• Modules Manager 1.5.1 (Core and basics)
• Settings Manager 1.9.5 (Core and basics)
• Updates Client 1.8.2 (Core and basics)
• Widgets Manager 2.1.1 (Core and basics)
• Categories Manager 1.9.6 (Core and basics)
• Contact Module 2.4.7 (Core and basics)
• Media Gallery 1.13.11 (Core and basics)
• Comments Subsystem 1.12.10 (Modules / Blogging)
• Moderation Module 1.2.3 (Modules / Blogging)
• Posts Subsystem 1.34.25 (Modules / Blogging)
• Search Module 1.4.8 (Modules / Blogging)
• EmojiOne for BardCanvas 1.1.4 (Modules / Blogging Addons)
• Giphy for BardCanvas 1.1.3 (Modules / Blogging Addons)
• Sharethis Support 1.0.1 (Modules / Blogging Addons)
• Twitter Cards Support 1.3.7 (Modules / Blogging Addons)
• YouTube for BardCanvas 1.1.8 (Modules / Blogging Addons)
• HTML and Ads Injection 1.3.2 (Modules / Miscellaneous)
• Customizable Header Logo 1.0.1 (Modules / Miscellaneous)
• Logs Viewer 1.2.6 (Modules / Miscellaneous)
• XML Menus Editor 1.3.1 (Modules / Miscellaneous)
• Base template 1.12.9 (Templates)
• Andrea template 1.8.9 (Templates)
• Patricia template 1.5.9 (Templates)
• Blue Network template 1.5.9 (Templates)
• Orange Network template 1.6.9 (Templates)

▶️ Go to the download and setup instructions page

Did we mention it is Open Source?

BardCanvas is released under the terms of the GNU GPL v3 license. This makes BardCanvas free as in free beer.

You can download and modify all files of all packages present on this website that are part of the base packages. You can also take a look at GitHub and download the source code directly from there.

▶️ Search all the BardCanvas repositories at GitHub

A marketplace will be born

Currently, all work here is authored by LAVA SoftWorks, but we're preparing everything needed to allow anyone to join and publish their works either as free or as commercial, giving the authors full control on how they receive donations or payments for their work. Yeah, we're not building a store, just a publishing place.

Join us on this ride!

If you want to get your hands on BardCanvas, please use the links above to get yourself fit.

But... there is no documentation at the moment. We're sorry for that, and will try to fix it within the next weeks.

Feel free to use the Contact Form to reach us in case you have to know anything about BardCanvas or LAVA SoftWorks. We'll be glad to answer all your doubts.