Dmk
I mentioned this back in March in the “What Elixir related stuff are you doing?” thread. It’s been out of beta for a while now, so I figured I’d do a proper post.
BrightSite is a hosted website builder. I got tired of dealing with WordPress, and then tried out Beacon CMS - but it wasn’t what I was looking for - so decided to build my own. I’ve been working on it for about a year and have been running live production sites (my own and my clients) on it for 6 months.
It has a WYSIWYG editor, forms, analytics with session replay, heatmaps, SEO tools, help center docs, staging sites, a built-in AI assistant, and e-commerce (currently in private beta), and a bunch of templates to start from.
It’s all one Phoenix app and one Postgres database, with Cloudflare in front and R2 for storage.
The Elixir side
Every public page on a customer’s site is a LiveView. The first request is plain server-rendered HTML, so it loads fast and search engines see everything. After that the page holds a socket, and internal links are rewritten to data-phx-link="patch", so going from page to page sends a diff instead of reloading. A small hook updates the title, meta, Open Graph and JSON-LD tags on each navigation. Page views are tracked in handle_params, so they count per page, not per socket.
There’s an MCP server (using Nexus MCP) that exposes all functionality. You can connect Claude, ChatGPT or any other AI tool. Or you can use the built-in assistant (Lumi).
Infrastructure
It runs on a single Hetzner server on the east coast of the US, with Cloudflare in front for SSL, firewall, and DDoS protection. Media lives in R2.
- Postgres is backed up continuously with pgBackRest, with additional daily and weekly backups.
- A streaming standby copy of the database runs on separate hardware.
- Pages, posts, layouts and components keep a version history, so restoring a previous version is one click.
- Deployments are handled by Xamal.
What I’m working on next:
- A second app server with load balancing
- Caching the first render at the edge with Cloudflare. Every visitor holds a process and a socket, which is great for navigation, but the first page load should come from the edge.
Happy to answer questions about any of it.
If anyone wants to try it out, plans start at $29 a month per site. Code ELIXIRFORUM takes 50% off your first 12 months ($14.50 a month) and is valid through October 31.
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absowoot
I had a long response written up about how I worked at a Wordpress-based agency for a long time and how plugin updates were the bane of my existence, but then I saw the vs Wordpress page which summarizes my experience. I’m concluding that Wordpress will continue to lose it’s market share and projects like this are going to reform the agency model and eventually make agencies unnecessary for a (small) business to have a web presence. I think that this is a great idea and I wish that I came up with it lol.
I’m curious to hear your long-term vision for this project. Recipes for more complex features? Agents to write blog articles, generate graphics/templates, landing pages?
Dmk
Yeah I’ve lived the Wordpress struggle for too many years
. Yeah hopefully this enables small businesses to have a very solid online presence without the need for outside help.
Short term I’m focusing on things that make my agency work easier/more enjoyable. Decided today to finally implement a local search solution instead of using LocalFalcon, Semrush, BrightLocal, etc. All of those tools have bothered me for one reason or another.
After that probably AI visibility/results monitoring. Page speed monitoring. Social media scheduling. Whatever else comes up that bothers me.
After that have the system take all the data and suggest (or apply automatically) changes to make to improve things. A bunch more reporting and more automations.
Dmk
Probably email marketing campaigns as well. Bye-bye Mailchimp!