[HN Gopher] Show HN: Foundry: a Markdown-first CMS written in Go
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Show HN: Foundry: a Markdown-first CMS written in Go
Hi HN! I've been building a CMS called Foundry, brought together
from multiple smaller private projects as well as greenfield code.
The short version is: it's a CMS written in Go with a focus on
markdown content, a simple hook-based plugin model, themes,
archetypes, preview flows, and a clean authoring/developer
experience. I started working on it because I wanted something
that was more powerful than Hugo for a few of my websites, without
having to resort to dangling onto a database. What seems different
about it, at least to me, is that I'm trying to keep the system
small in concept: local content, explicit behavior, compile-time
plugin registration, and an admin/editor layer that is meant to
stay close to how the content actually lives on disk. The goal is
not to make "yet another website builder", but to make a CMS that
is easy to use and quick to onramp onto, but has powerful advanced
features and extensibility. Still early, but usable enough that I
wanted to put it in front of people here and get feedback. Please
don't castigate me on the UI look - I'm not a designer, and the
themes are basically clones of each other. Happy to answer
technical questions, architecture questions, or hear where this
seems useful versus where it does not.
Author : nsayoda
Score : 11 points
Date : 2026-03-27 17:05 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| jeremykalfus wrote:
| Interesting concept. You may run into legal trouble with Palantir
| over the name Foundry if you scale, lol. Otherwise it's cool--
| website looks way too AI generated IMO.
|
| No hate tho, you got this.
| nsayoda wrote:
| Thank you! That's a valid concern - though I think I should be
| ok as Foundry CMS. Something I'll have to keep in mind, and
| hopefully it scales!
|
| > website looks way too AI generated IMO
|
| The docs? Yeah that and the base themes were all from AI-
| generated scaffolds that I then wired into the project with the
| SDK - UI/UX is not my forte. Hopefully I can either hire a
| proper designer in the future (at least for the docs and
| default theme), or a designer in the community decides to help
| with the project
| Tomjosetj31 wrote:
| The instinct to keep the system "small in concept" is the right
| one, and it's harder to maintain than it sounds -- most CMS
| projects start focused and then bloat themselves into irrelevance
| trying to be everything. The tell will be how you handle feature
| requests that are genuinely useful but push against that
| philosophy. What's already been the hardest "no" to say?
| nsayoda wrote:
| Very well put. I'm hoping most features can live in standalone
| plugins built by the community or myself, rather than being
| built into the core. The goal is to keep the core small and
| avoid bloat, while still leaving plenty of room for features
| and customization.
|
| The hardest "no" so far has been a request to change the
| license from AGPLv3 to MIT
|
| That might not sound like a huge deal, but most of my previous
| FOSS projects have been MIT licensed, and with this one I want
| to keep the expectation that modifications to the core remain
| available to the public under the same license terms
|
| I did carve out explicit exceptions around a boundary: third-
| party themes and plugins are not intended to be pulled into the
| copyleft scope. I spelled that out in the repo alongside the
| license in the LICENSE.*.EXCEPTION files
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