Open Source Content Management · PHP · GPL-3.0

A Light, Enjoyable CMS That Makes It Easy To Build A Great Website.

Free and open source, Elementary is ready for you, your business, and your clients. It runs on any standard shared hosting, web server, or cPanel server with a LAMP stack.

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A sample bakery website built with Elementary's default 2026 theme, showing a list of posts.
The default 2026 theme, shown with sample content.

No. 01

Features And Benefits

Ships ready to use. Great for small business, personal, portfolio, or blog websites.

Intuitive And Light

Feature rich, with sensible defaults, while you get to make the choices you need to make your website yours.

Blazing Fast

The built-in caching system means traffic spikes and AI bot crawling are problems of the past. Less resource usage and faster page loads mean better user experience, improved SEO, and lower hosting costs.

White Label Friendly

Just change the app name in the config file to whatever you want. Great for web developers and agencies.

Secure By Design

User role management, 2FA, and an optional Cloudflare Turnstile plugin.

Pages, Posts, And Layouts

Write posts with categories and tags, and build pages from rows, columns, and text, image, or video blocks. Manage menus, files, and your home page from Settings.

Versions And A Recycle Bin

Compare changes against previous versions, restore an older one, and recover deleted content from the recycle bin.

No. 02

A Quiet, Focused Admin

Screenshots from a fresh Elementary 1.0.1 install with sample content.

The Elementary admin dashboard with Pages, Posts, Files, and System panels.
Dashboard
The Elementary post editor with title, post settings, featured image, SEO settings, excerpt, and a rich text content editor.
Post Editor

Most core functionality lives in config.php, while the Settings screen handles everyday features in your browser. Handing sites off to clients or less technical users is less likely to end in a broken website or a long support call.

No. 03

Getting Started

Requirements

A LAMP stack or compatible Linux server environment. Typical low cost shared hosting is perfectly suited, and a VPS, cloud environment, dedicated server, or Docker works too.

  1. Upload the files to your web root.
  2. Create a MySQL database.
  3. Rename config.sample.php to config.php and configure it.
  4. In your browser, go to /install on your site to create your admin account.
  5. In the config file, set installed to true to disable future access to the installer.
  6. Log in at /admin to get started.

Updating

Upload the new files over your existing installation, check config.sample.php for new options, then visit /update to migrate the database.

No. 04

Themes And Plugins

Themes

Themes live in theme/. Required: index.php (metadata) and template.php. Optional: post.php, page.php, category.php, and page-{slug}.php templates.

Hooks: before_render, after_render. Helpers: url(), esc(), format_date().

Plugins

Plugins live in plugin/. Required: index.php (metadata) and plugin.php (hooks). Enable them in config:

'plugins' => ['my-plugin'],

No. 05

Recommended Hosting Providers

Typical low cost hosting is perfectly suited for Elementary. These providers are a great place to start.

NameCraneVisit NameCrane Shock HostingVisit Shock Hosting DigitalOceanVisit DigitalOcean Napa AIVisit Napa AI

Some links are affiliate links. Choosing one supports the project at no extra cost to you.

No. 06

Free And Open Source

Elementary is licensed under the GPL-3.0. Enjoy! It bundles Bootstrap, Bootstrap Icons, PHPMailer, and Summernote, with thanks to the people who built them.

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