Microweber

Microweber is a full‑stack, drag‑and‑drop CMS and e‑commerce platform built on Laravel 10. At its core, it exposes a modular architecture that lets developers add or replace UI widgets, database models, and business logic without touching the core codebase. The application is shipped as a standard Composer‑driven Laravel project, enabling integration with existing PHP ecosystems and deployment pipelines.

Key Features

• Visual Builder – A client‑side React/AlpineJS editor that serializes page layouts into JSON stored in the database. The API exposes CRUD endpoints for pages, modules, and assets.
• E‑commerce Engine – Built on top of the same modular system, offering product catalogs, cart/session persistence, payment gateway hooks (Stripe, PayPal), and shipping calculators.
• Multilingual & SEO – Stores translations per page/module and auto‑generates sitemaps, meta tags, and canonical URLs.
• Plugin & Module System – Developers can ship modules as Composer packages that register routes, migrations, and Blade components. The marketplace API allows dynamic discovery of third‑party extensions.

Technical Stack

Core Capabilities

• RESTful API – /api/v1/* endpoints for pages, posts, products, and media. Supports JWT authentication for headless consumption.
• Webhooks – Triggered on CRUD events (e.g., product.created, order.completed) to integrate with external CRMs or analytics.
• Custom Modules – Define Blade templates, CSS/JS assets, and PHP classes that can be dropped into pages via the editor.
• Theme System – Themes are just ZIP packages that contain Blade layouts, assets, and optional Composer dependencies.

Deployment & Infrastructure

Microweber can run on any LAMP/LEMP stack that supports PHP 8.2+. For production, the recommended setup is:

1. Web Server – Nginx or Apache with PHP‑FPM.
2. Database – MySQL 8+ (or PostgreSQL) with proper indexing on pages, modules, and products.
3. Cache – Redis for session handling; optional Memcached for query caching.
4. Queue Workers – Laravel Horizon or Supervisor to keep background jobs running.

The project ships with Docker Compose files that expose all services (web, db, redis) and allow scaling workers horizontally. Kubernetes manifests are available in the community repository for cloud‑native deployments.

Integration & Extensibility

• Composer Packages – Modules can declare microweber.module tags to be auto‑discovered during bootstrapping.
• API Hooks – Middleware can intercept API requests to add custom authentication or rate limiting.
• Webhook Endpoints – Expose public URLs that external services can POST to, enabling real‑time synchronization with ERP or marketing automation tools.
• CLI Commands – Artisan commands for migrations, cache clearing, and module publishing simplify automation.

Developer Experience

• Documentation – Comprehensive guides on the official site, including architecture diagrams and API reference.
• Community & Support – Active GitHub issues, a Discord channel, and an official forum. Contributions are encouraged via pull requests.
• Configuration – .env‑driven settings cover database, cache, queue, and third‑party services. The admin panel also exposes runtime toggles for caching, debug mode, and feature flags.

Use Cases

• Headless CMS – Expose content via the API to a React or Vue front‑end, using Microweber as a data source.
• Rapid E‑commerce MVPs – Spin up an online store with drag‑and‑drop product pages and instant payment integration.
• Agency Tooling – Package custom modules (e.g., SEO optimizer, analytics widget) and distribute them across client sites.
• Multilingual Sites – Leverage built‑in translation support for global e‑commerce platforms.

Advantages

• Performance – Laravel’s optimized query builder and Redis caching yield sub‑200 ms page loads on modest hardware.
• Flexibility – The module system allows developers to replace or extend any component without forking the core.
• Licensing – Open‑source under MIT, with optional commercial support plans for enterprise deployments.
• Scalability – Stateless API layers can be load‑balanced; database replicas and read/write splits are straightforward to configure.

Microweber delivers a developer‑friendly, self‑hosted solution that marries the ease of visual editing with the power of Laravel’s ecosystem, making it an attractive choice for agencies and individual developers building dynamic, e‑commerce‑ready websites.