Today's blog post will be a more technical one. It will be valuable to those of you that run the universal package or want to know how the standalone package works (learn more about them). Actually, they share the same code base almost entirely.
As you know, a Bear CMS-powered website consists of two parts:
- The client code that renders the website (it's hosted on your server).
When a visitor opens your website, your server handles the request and returns the requested page or resource. The CMS part is not activated in this case. But when an administrator signs in, the client starts talking to the Bear CMS cloud to provide the editing capabilities. This communication is invisible and very optimized, so it's hard to tell that the CMS is hosted somewhere else.
As you know, a Bear CMS-powered website consists of two parts:
- The client code that renders the website (it's hosted on your server).
- The CMS part that is hosted by us.
The client software
The heavy lifting here is done by the Bear Framework and the Bear CMS addon. They are both open-sourced and purposefully build to run a website efficiently.
Bear Framework provides request/response utilities, data storage, logs, working with assets, etc. It's lightweight and optimized for building big and small web apps. Try it yourself, we've put a lot of effort into developing and refining it.
The Bear CMS addon adds the CMS capabilities to Bear Framework. It's responsible for the themes, the content elements, the responsive images, etc. And using the standalone package you can be sure this client software is always up to date.
Bear Framework provides request/response utilities, data storage, logs, working with assets, etc. It's lightweight and optimized for building big and small web apps. Try it yourself, we've put a lot of effort into developing and refining it.
The Bear CMS addon adds the CMS capabilities to Bear Framework. It's responsible for the themes, the content elements, the responsive images, etc. And using the standalone package you can be sure this client software is always up to date.
The Bear CMS service
This is the secret sauce, or at least the not open source part of the solution we provide. Bear Framework is used here too, as it's suitable for different types of web apps. The main purpose of this service is to send some valuable information to the client software. Here are some example situations:
The client: Give me the HTML code for the edit form for the image element.
The service: This is the HTML code.
The client: Here is the submit request for the form.
The service: Save this value to this key in your database.
The client: Give me the HTML code for the theme customizer.
The service: This is the HTML code requested.
Hosting the CMS part ourselves allows us to improve it without pushing updates to your server. This means faster updates and fixes, always up to date management experience and smaller attack service for hackers.
The client: Give me the HTML code for the edit form for the image element.
The service: This is the HTML code.
The client: Here is the submit request for the form.
The service: Save this value to this key in your database.
The client: Give me the HTML code for the theme customizer.
The service: This is the HTML code requested.
Hosting the CMS part ourselves allows us to improve it without pushing updates to your server. This means faster updates and fixes, always up to date management experience and smaller attack service for hackers.
Sounds interesting?
We'd like to geek more about architecture and technology, so feel free to contacts us.
And please, take a look at Bear Framework - it can help you with your next web project.