Small organisations are usually offered an expensive proprietary bundle they'll never fully use, or a bespoke build nobody can maintain once its builder leaves. Wanating CMS Core is a third option: one self-hosted platform, cheap to run, built so it doesn't depend on any one person.
A proprietary CMS or CRM bundle fixes the sustainability problem and creates a budget one: a licence that doesn't shrink to fit a small organisation, and half the platform unused. A bespoke build fixes the budget and creates the sustainability problem. It works well right up until the person who understands it leaves, and then it's a liability nobody wants to touch.
Most small organisations, charities especially, live with one of those trade-offs because nobody has offered them anything else.
Wanating CMS Core runs cheaply on a single server, sized to a small organisation's real budget. It's structured so that keeping it going doesn't depend on one person's memory. A sector-neutral core serves any sector through capability packs, so a charity, a company and a personal site all run on the same platform, with no fork.
One well-structured application on one server costs a fraction of a cluster of microservices or a per-seat licence, and you don't give up what the platform can do.
The line between the core and anything sector-specific is enforced by automated tests, so the code doesn't quietly rot as more gets built on top.
A new sector shouldn't mean rebuilding the platform. Three complete reference packs, Charity, Personal and Corporate, exist to prove it.
A new sector is a capability pack on top of the core. Eight packs exist so far, from charity and campaigns to membership, volunteering and education.
Branding and presentation live in their own layer, away from content logic, so restyling a site never risks changing how it behaves.
Which packs and theme are switched on is just configuration. A deployment is cheap to run and easy to reason about, on a single server.
Django and Wagtail underneath, Postgres for storage, and REST and GraphQL APIs that the bundled website uses exactly as an outside one would. It's deployed with Docker Compose on a single Ubuntu server, with Terraform. Swapping the frontend later, or moving to bigger infrastructure, is a configuration change.
Phase 1 is running today: the core platform, its APIs and a working reference website, as one application on one server. The direction from here is real charity deployments at cloud scale, without changing what a deployment looks like day to day.
It's a private, licensable component rather than an open-source project.
Evaluating this for an organisation? Get in touch.