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Winter Laravel Package
wintercms/winter
Winter CMS is a free, open-source content management system built on Laravel. Forked from October CMS and maintained by the community, it offers a powerful plugin marketplace, Twig-based templating, and a flexible admin interface for building and managing websites quickly.
Winter CMS is a free, open-source content management system built on Laravel, designed for developers who want a powerful, flexible platform without sacrificing simplicity. It combines Laravel’s modern PHP ecosystem with an intuitive backend, Twig-powered themes, and a rich extension architecture for building everything from small sites to complex applications.
- Laravel foundation with familiar MVC patterns, Eloquent, and modern PHP support
- Plugin and theme marketplace for extending functionality and customizing sites
- Twig templating with a powerful AJAX framework and reusable components
- Polished backend UI including media management, permissions, and localization
- Active open-source community with extensive documentation and long-term maintenance
Frequently asked questions about Winter
- Can I install Winter CMS as a Composer package inside an existing Laravel application?
- No. Winter CMS is a full Laravel application distribution with its own bootstrap, service providers, and system, backend, and cms modules, not a library you pull into an existing service. Mounting it inside an existing Laravel app to share models, auth, or routes is unsupported in practice and should be treated as out of scope. Deploy it as its own application, in a separate repository, subdomain, or path prefix, and integrate over HTTP, webhooks, a shared read replica, or a queue.
- How do I install Winter CMS?
- Install it the same way you would scaffold a Laravel application: run composer create-project wintercms/winter into a new directory, point a virtual host or subdomain at the public directory, and complete the setup wizard. It is a standalone application, so plan for Composer 2, PHP 8.x, a supported database, and Redis for cache, sessions, and queues in production. Do not try to add it to an existing application's composer.json.
- Which PHP and Laravel versions does Winter CMS support?
- Winter tracks Laravel majors on its own release cadence rather than mirroring upstream immediately, so the supported PHP and Laravel minor versions depend on the Winter release you deploy. Confirm the exact matrix in the release notes and composer.json constraints for that tag before committing, since this is a moving target. The same caution applies to the database support matrix, so verify MySQL, PostgreSQL, or SQLite support against the documentation for your version rather than assuming parity with a stock Laravel install.
- Can Winter CMS be used as a headless CMS or content API for a SPA?
- Not out of the box. Core content delivery is server-rendered Twig themes and components rather than a JSON API. Headless delivery is possible by adding a headless or API plugin, but that plugin becomes a third-party dependency you must evaluate for maintenance and security like any other. If an API-first content service is the real requirement, a dedicated headless CMS or Laravel plus a content package is a better shape.
- How should I integrate Winter CMS with an existing Laravel application?
- Deploy Winter as its own application, either on a subdomain or a path prefix behind a reverse proxy, and integrate over well-defined boundaries: HTTP calls, webhooks, a shared database read replica, or a queue. That lets the CMS own its HTTP kernel, routing, and admin surface instead of fighting yours. Anything that tries to share Eloquent models, auth guards, or routes between the two applications is unsupported in practice and should be treated as out of scope.
- Is Winter CMS free for commercial use and what license does it use?
- Yes. Winter CMS is released under the MIT license, which permits commercial use, modification, and redistribution. That removes the most common procurement objection and legally allows you to fork and self-maintain the project if upstream stalls, which matters given its lineage as a community fork of October CMS after that project's licensing change. The trade-off is that forking is an engineering cost you must be willing to fund, not a free option.
- Are Winter CMS marketplace plugins safe to use in production?
- Treat every plugin as an unaudited code dependency that can auto-run migrations on deploy. The marketplace is thinner than October CMS's historical ecosystem, so you may end up choosing between paid plugins with unclear maintenance and building components yourself. Before adopting one, check who maintains it, whether it is owned by the core team, its release history, and what it does at boot, then vet it in staging with database backups and a tested rollback.
- How difficult are Winter CMS and Laravel upgrades?
- It is a three-body problem: Winter tracks Laravel majors on its own cadence, so patching Laravel for security may require upgrading Winter, which may in turn require upgrading plugins and adjusting theme code. The release cadence looks active, which is good for security but increases the surface you must regression test. Budget for this quarterly rather than treating it as an occasional one-off project.
- How does Winter CMS compare to October CMS and which should I choose?
- Winter is a community fork of October CMS created after that project's licensing shift, and it is MIT licensed. Its community is materially smaller than October's historical base, roughly 1.5k GitHub stars versus the parent project's order of magnitude, so the marketplace is thinner and third-party plugin coverage is less predictable. Choose Winter when MIT licensing and full forkability matter more to you than ecosystem depth.
- Is Winter CMS actively maintained, and what happens if the maintainers stop?
- The release cadence looks active, but Winter is volunteer-maintained and bus factor plus long-term maintainer continuity are the headline risks given its smaller community. The mitigation is structural: the MIT license and public repository let you fork and self-maintain. That implies a standing engineering tax, so decide up front who in-house owns core upgrades, plugin vetting, and security patches, and what patch SLA you can realistically rely on from a volunteer-maintained project.
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