README

Lightweight modular CMS with a forum, blogs, gallery and file downloads.
Fast even on cheap shared hosting.

Rotor is an open source content management system written in PHP. It combines a community platform (forum, guestbook, wall, private messages) with classic site features (news, blogs, photo gallery, downloads, static pages) in a single lightweight package.

The engine is built on Laravel components but stays deliberately small: it installs in minutes, runs comfortably on inexpensive shared hosting, and keeps server load minimal even with a large audience.

Screenshots

Home page	Forum

Live example: visavi.net — the developer community site, always running the latest version of Rotor.

Features

Forum — categories, topics, voting, moderation
Blogs and news — articles with comments, categories, RSS
Photo gallery — albums, comments, watermarks
Downloads — file archive with categories and moderation
Community tools — guestbook, user walls, private messages, boards (classifieds), mini-chat
Users — registration, social auth, groups and permissions, ratings, custom profile fields
Administration — full admin panel, page editor, style editor, backups, logs, spam/word filters
Modular architecture — features ship as modules that can be installed, updated and disabled independently
Performance — aggressive caching, minimal queries, works well without opcache tuning or dedicated servers
Themes — customizable templates and styles

Requirements

PHP 8.3+
MySQL 5.7.8+, MariaDB 10.2.7+ or PostgreSQL 9.2+
Any web server: Apache, Nginx, or the built-in PHP server

Quick start

One command (Composer)

composer create-project visavi/rotor .

Then open the site in a browser — the installer starts automatically and walks you through database setup and creating an admin account.

For the latest development version:

composer create-project --stability=dev visavi/rotor .

Docker (Laravel Sail)

git clone https://github.com/visavi/rotor.git
cd rotor
cp .env.example .env
composer install
./vendor/bin/sail up -d

Open http://localhost and follow the installer.

From an archive

Unpack the archive so that public is the web root (not required for Apache — the bundled .htaccess handles it)
Copy .env.example to .env and fill in the database credentials, admin login/email and mail settings
Make the directories inside public/uploads, public/assets/modules, bootstrap/cache and storage writable, or run php artisan app:permission
Open the site's main page — you will be redirected to the installer

Manual installation

git clone https://github.com/visavi/rotor.git
cd rotor
cp .env.example .env        # fill in DB credentials, admin login/email, mail settings
composer install
php artisan migrate
php artisan db:seed

Create the database with utf8mb4 encoding beforehand:

CREATE DATABASE rotor CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci;

Local run without a web server

php artisan serve

Then open http://localhost:8000.

Server configuration

Cron

* * * * * php /path-to-site/artisan schedule:run >>/dev/null 2>&1

Apache

Two layouts work on typical shared hosting:

Default. Put all files in public_html. The .htaccess in the site root redirects every request to the public directory, and the .htaccess inside public routes them to index.php.
Split. Put the engine one level above public_html and move the contents of public into public_html. Uncomment the corresponding code in app/Providers/AppServiceProvider.php to point the engine at the new public path. The root .htaccess can then be removed.

Nginx

Add to the server section (strips trailing slashes and blocks direct PHP access in upload dirs):

if (!-d $request_filename) {
    rewrite ^/(.*)/$ /$1 permanent;
}

location ~* /(assets|themes|uploads)/.*\.php$ {
    deny all;
}

In location / replace:

try_files $uri $uri/ =404;

with:

try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$query_string;

Development

Frontend assets (Vite)

npm ci
npm run build

Migrations and seeding

php artisan migrate:status      # current migration status
php artisan migrate             # run migrations
php artisan migrate:rollback    # rollback the last batch
php artisan db:seed             # seed the database

Production caching

With APP_ENV=production routes and configuration are cached automatically.

Community & support

Forum: visavi.net — questions, modules, themes, announcements
Telegram: @visavi
Issues: GitHub Issues — bug reports and feature requests

Contributions are welcome — fork the repository and open a pull request.

Author

Vantuz — visavi.net · admin@visavi.net · Telegram @visavi

License

Rotor is open-sourced software licensed under the GPL-3.0 license.

visavi / rotor

Maintainers

Package info

Statistics

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