Getting Started / About Bolt

Note: You are currently reading the documentation for Bolt 3.7. Looking for the documentation for Bolt 5.2 instead?

Bolt is a tool for Content Management, which strives to be as simple and straightforward as possible. It is quick to set up, easy to configure, uses elegant templates, and above all: it's a joy to use. Bolt is created using modern Open Source libraries, and is best suited to build sites in HTML5, with modern markup.

Basically, there are three groups of users we've created Bolt for:

• End users (read 'editors') that want to focus on producing and editing content, and not on clicking buttons in the CMS.
• Front-end designers and developers who like to write clean markup, and who want to build websites where the CMS doesn't dictate what the templates or site should look like.
• Developers who need a system that's easy to set up and configure, that's easy to manage and maintain, but is also flexible and versatile.

Using Bolt as a content editor: you don't have to know anything about HTML, CSS, PHP or any of the other technical stuff we used to build Bolt. Using Bolt should be about writing and editing content, so that's the focus of Bolt's user interface. Far more information about how Bolt works can be found in the User manual.

Building a website with Bolt: we assume you have the usual Frontender skills. You know HTML/CSS, and have working knowledge about JavaScript so you can implement things like Google Analytics trackers, jQuery plugins and such. To create a working site out of your static HTML, you'll need to know about how Bolt uses Content and ContentTypes, and how to make templates using Twig. Information about those topics can be found in the chapters ContentTypes and Building templates.

With creating Bolt we wanted to focus on creating something simple, straightforward and enjoyable. Bolt concentrates on being a content management system with a small footprint. Out of the box it may not offer all of the features of larger systems, but, being built on modular, loosely coupled components it can be an ideal foundation for projects large and small.