Build agency-quality websites with AI agents. Own the result.
Progressive CMS is an agent-native, self-hosted CMS for building, publishing, and maintaining professional websites with AI coding agents on infrastructure you control. Turn a business brief, design references, and content into a complete, custom website. AI agents can set up Progressive CMS, build themes and pages, organize navigation, prepare SEO, validate changes, and publish the result.
You guide the work and review the output. Once the site is live, you can maintain it through a full CMS Admin interface — with or without an AI agent.
Get started · Build your first site · AI agent workflow · Documentation
Open source · Self-hosted · Public Beta
Much of the repetitive work traditionally done by hand can be performed by AI agents using model inference. Teams can focus their time on creative direction, business requirements, and quality control.
No per-site CMS license fees. Agent-assisted development shifts much of the production effort toward model usage, infrastructure, creative direction, and human review. Production costs vary with complexity, model choice, source materials, and human review. The result depends on the brief, the agent's work, and your review; no fixed cost or level of quality is guaranteed by a prompt.
Progressive CMS runs on your own Linux server. Your content, database, media, and themes remain under your control. The resulting website is a normal, editable CMS project that you can operate, modify, and maintain independently.
Developers can build custom themes and integrations. Studios can use agents across website production and hand clients an editable CMS. Business owners retain the site, its source and its data, with freedom to choose who maintains it.
An external coding agent works on a real CMS project through documented tools. It can author a custom Liquid theme in your workspace, create structured content through the CMS, inspect previews, and publish the revisions you approve. The result stays editable in Admin; continued maintenance does not require keeping the original agent session.
Business brief → design references → installation → theme and content → validation → SEO → publication → ongoing maintenance.
- Brief and references: define the business goals, pages, languages, source materials, and visual direction. The agent translates these into a page plan and editable content.
- Installation: authorize a specific server and follow the native installer, domain, HTTPS, and initial-account setup. Authoring then uses scoped CMS credentials.
- Theme and content: build the design in a Liquid theme; use declared content fields for articles and page sections, managed media, forms, and navigation. Reuse existing Content Types when suitable.
- Validation and SEO: validate revisions, inspect exact previews, check responsive layouts and links, then review titles, canonical URLs, indexing rules, and social images.
- Publication: seal the reviewed revision and publish through the CMS within the authorized scope. Check the resulting public routes and applicable search results.
- Maintenance and client handoff: keep improving the theme and content through documented workflows. A normal editor can open Admin, edit the declared fields, preview, and publish another revision.
The First Site guide provides commands and payloads for an installed instance. Installation covers the separate operator workflow. The agent workflow connects discovery, authoring, validation, and editor handoff.
If you use Codex, Claude Code, OpenCode, or another coding-agent harness, check which instruction and transport mechanisms your host supports. Progressive CMS exposes portable Agent Skills, a CLI, REST, and MCP; it does not require a particular model or AI provider.
| Mechanism | What the agent uses it for | Start here |
|---|---|---|
| Agent Skills | Follow the site-building or maintenance workflow, with bundled references and examples. | Installation in your agent and compatibility checks |
| CLI | Run documented discovery, validation, authoring, theme, and publication commands from an authorized workspace. | CLI guide and complete command map |
| REST | Read and change CMS objects with the current API contract and scoped credentials. | REST guide, operation map, and OpenAPI |
| MCP | Use tools advertised by the running instance through a configured MCP connection. | MCP guide and tool/protocol map |
A Skill provides instructions, not permissions. CLI/REST access needs the authorized origin, site, environment, and credentials; MCP needs a configured connection. Host-specific Skill setup is documented where available. Format compatibility does not establish a tested session in every named client or an official partnership with its vendor. Check the actual target version and capabilities before making changes.
Give your agent the installation guide, requirements, and Operator Skill. Authorize the intended server and installation explicitly. Installation requires administrative privileges; ordinary content authoring uses scoped CMS credentials.
Once the CMS is installed, give the agent your brief and the Site Builder Skill. Follow the agent workflow to discover the installed contracts, create editable content, validate it, and publish only within the authorized scope.
cms agent bootstrap --jsonThis command is the discovery entry point after configuring the instance URL, site/environment context, and credentials. See Agent Skills for setup. Choose your own agent and model; ordinary Admin editing requires no AI subscription.
For an installed instance, a concrete authoring request is:
Use progressive-cms-site-builder to create an editable company website from the supplied brief and design references. Use only the authorized CMS origin, site, and environment. Start with bootstrap, inspect the existing Content Types and active theme, and report missing prerequisites. Build the pages, navigation, media, and forms through documented CMS operations. Validate and preview the revisions, check responsive layouts and SEO, and publish only if this task authorizes it. Finish with the changed object IDs, observed public URLs, validation results, and instructions for a normal editor to continue in Admin.
Supply the business facts and references with the request. Keep credentials in the approved secret channel; the prompt does not grant installation, schema changes, theme activation, or publication authority by itself.
- Get the official ZIP and SHA-256 sidecar from GitHub Releases.
- Verify the checksum and follow the installation guide. Choose local Nginx or an external reverse proxy, and configure HTTPS.
- Sign in to Admin, change the bootstrap password, and check the installation with
cms doctor. - Follow First Site for the content model, theme, navigation, and publishing workflow. Use Admin for ongoing content editing.
The current installation target is Ubuntu 26.04 with systemd, Node.js 24, and PostgreSQL. Read the exact requirements before provisioning. See BUILDING.md if you want to build from source instead of installing an official archive.
These guides contain the documented commands, payloads, and checks for each task. They describe reproducible procedures rather than a guarantee about a particular agent's output.
| Task | Workflow and completion check |
|---|---|
| Install Progressive CMS with an agent | Installation and the Operator Skill: authorized host, verified artifact, configured HTTPS, and installation diagnostics. |
| Build an editable corporate website | First Site and the Site Builder Skill: theme, declared content, navigation, forms, previews, and editor handoff. |
| Manage content through MCP or the CLI | MCP, CLI, and Publishing: discover operations, create a draft, edit with its current generation, preview, seal, and publish. |
| Publish and check SEO changes | Publishing and SEO: verify the exact revision and public HTML, canonical/indexing metadata, sitemap, and applicable Search state. |
| Hand a site to a client and maintain it | Admin, Themes, and Operations: an editor continues authoring; authorized operators maintain the theme and CMS. |
| Area | Capabilities and reference |
|---|---|
| Content | Typed content models, visual RichText with tables and images, and Block Documents for structured page composition. |
| Publishing | Drafts, revisions, CAS editing, preview, sealing, publication, and scheduling. |
| Design | Liquid themes, live theme activation/settings, revision history and rollback; navigation and breadcrumbs. |
| Media and forms | Managed media and derivatives, forms and submissions. |
| Discovery | Search and reindex, SEO metadata, canonical URLs, sitemaps, pagination and ownership verification. |
| Automation | REST API, CLI, MCP, and supplied Agent Skills. |
| Access control | Roles, permissions, sessions, and scoped Service Accounts. Agents remain subject to server-side permissions. |
| Extensions | Public Extension SDK 2.0 for independent packages; optional capabilities are installed deliberately. |
The full interface maps are published with the source and versioned alongside each release. Use the guide for a workflow, then the map for exact commands, operations, arguments, permissions, and error behavior.
| Interface | Task guide | Complete reference |
|---|---|---|
| REST API | REST guide | Full REST operation map |
| CLI | CLI guide | Full commands and options map |
| MCP | MCP guide | Full tools and protocol map |
| API schema | API reference | OpenAPI JSON |
Inspect the installed instance's discovery and OpenAPI when using optional extensions: its active capabilities can differ from the standard release. The maps document their schema and transport limitations explicitly.
Progressive CMS is a TypeScript modular monolith with a Web application, Admin UI, background Worker, CLI, and PostgreSQL. Themes control presentation through Liquid; content remains in versioned CMS documents. A CMS installation does not require a particular AI provider.
Core includes the public Extension SDK. The official Extensions source is a separate repository; source builds verify pinned package versions and digests. Independent extensions may use their own licenses, including commercial licenses. Trusted server extensions execute with application privileges: install only code you trust.
See BUILDING.md, the extension development guide, and the documentation index. English is the primary documentation language; Russian documentation is a partial translation.
This is Progressive CMS 1.0 Public Beta. Interfaces and operational workflows may still need refinement. Evaluate it for your workload and keep recoverable backups before upgrading.
The first Public Beta uses technical version 1.0.0-rc.29. The rc identifier preserves the existing Registry version contract and upgrade order for earlier installations. This is a beta prerelease, not stable 1.0.0.
Every official release has a source tag and an entry in GitHub Releases, with the installable ZIP, SHA-256 checksum, release manifest, and release notes. GitHub's generated source archives serve a different purpose from the installable ZIP. Previous release entries, tags, and archives remain available; new versions do not overwrite old artifacts.
The official Registry provides the same release artifact for native update workflows. See Operations for updates and recovery. Publication does not automatically update your website.
Report reproducible problems through GitHub Issues. Include the installed version, expected and actual behavior, and minimal reproduction steps. Remove credentials and personal data from logs and exports. Do not disclose exploitable security issues in public issues.
Pull requests are welcome for review under Apache-2.0 with a DCO 1.1 sign-off; no CLA is required. Contributions are reviewed for correctness, product scope, and maintenance cost. Progressive OS maintains the product direction and official release process.
Progressive CMS is an original product of Progressive OS, licensed under Apache License 2.0. Commercial use and modification are permitted, with no per-site CMS license fee or required promotional credit on your website.
See NOTICE, third-party notices, and the trademark policy. Dependencies and bundled third-party assets retain their own licenses.