Project Harakeke (Flax) CMS

Lightweight, Business-Ready, and Developer-Friendly Content Management System

Project Harakeke (Flax) CMS is a lightweight, business-ready, and developer-friendly Content Management System built with PHP and integrated with modern tools like Cloudflare D1, Editor.js, and browser-based AI (Transformers.js).

Screenshot of the Project Harakeke (Flax) CMS in development
Screenshot of the Project Harakeke (Flax) CMS in development

Mission & Vision


  • Business Accessibility: To empower small and mid-size businesses to manage their digital content with professional ease, without the bloat of traditional enterprise systems.
  • Innovation Sandbox: To serve as a foundation for continuous research and development in the implementation of cutting-edge web technologies, such as serverless databases and client-side AI.
  • Lightweight: To provide a lightweight platform that is easy to use and maintain.

Key Features

  • Pages & Blogs: Create and edit standard pages or blog posts with distinct fields.
  • BlockEditor: A rich editing experience using Editor.js, supporting headers, images, lists, quotes, and more.
  • SEO & Social: Per-page Meta Titles, Descriptions, Canonical URLs, and OG Image settings.
  • Automation: Automatic Slug generation from Titles and Canonical URL syncing.

AI Integration

  • AI Abstract: Generates a concise summary of your content using the `distilbart-cnn-6-6` model.
  • Sentiment Analysis: Analyzes the "vibe" of your writing using the `twitter-roberta-base-sentiment` model.

Asset Management

  • Asset Picker: A visual modal library to browse and select existing images.
  • Dedicated Uploads: Secure handling for Favicons and Company Logos with automatic file replacement and security scans.

Security & Authentication

  • Email-Based Authentication: All usernames are email addresses for improved security and future-proofing.
  • Session Management: Automatic logout after 60 minutes of inactivity and active session management.
  • Session token revocation on logout to prevent session reuse.
  • Role-Based Access Control: Granular permissions (superadmin, administrator, editor, contributor) with password change access for all roles.
  • Content Security Policy (CSP): Robust whitelisting for external resources (Cloudflare, Google Fonts, jsDelivr, HuggingFace).
  • HTTPS Enforcement: Automatic redirection to secure connections (with smart bypass for `localhost`).
  • CSRF Protection: Token-based validation for all sensitive form submissions.
  • Activity Logging: Comprehensive audit trail tracking administrative actions (user management, password changes, settings updates) and content management events (creating and editing pages or blog articles). Superadmin and administrator can clear logs.
  • Login Defence: SQL injection protection via prepared statements and Cloudflare Turnstile (CAPTCHA) integration.
  • Global Timezone: User-configured timezone applied site-wide for consistent timestamp handling.