I’ve spent some time thinking about this and some time going down paths I abandoned.

I have an effort underway which I’ve shared some stuff about in my newsletter. Since I’m aware that a CMS is a massive effort I’m trying to start with foundational libraries and stacking those bricks up over time.

Even on just this forum I’ve seen this idea come up and fall down.

I think Elixir could do great at CMS things but the road to featureful enough is absurd.

Give it a shot if you like. I applaud any effort in that direction but be aware that it is a lot of work.

My view on “solving” the CMS problem is pretty particular and it involves tackling this particular painpoint, among others: Underjord | The WordPress merging problem

For me it begins with making content type creation strong. And going down that route you’ll find out that Ecto schemas really are very compile-time and if you don’t want arbitrary atom proliferation, from code-gen, as a risk that leads to other choices. Can of worms

I can share more when and if it starts to make sense

There is a CMS system in itself for many years: Zotonic

However, Zotonic is based on Erlang, which can be extended and customized with your own modules and templates. The template-system is based on erlydtl.

My interest is rather Ecommerce, also for this Elixir would be actually well suited, there are also some companies that use it exactly for this, but just proprietary:

https://www.stitched.co.uk
https://www.therealreal.com/

For an open source ecommerce system you would need the possibility to develop plugins, especially to program your own themes for the store.

In Zotonic, for example, you can extend the template’s in a simple way via the blocks as in Django or PHP-Twig.

Zotonic Template’s

Twig-Template’s for Shopware

From time to time I try to figure out how to do this in Phoenix, but unfortunately I haven’t made any progress. Especially if there are other solutions instead of blocks? In such a store system, however, there can be hundreds of blocks, which are very fine-granular (as you can see in the shopware example).

I would be grateful for ideas regarding extensible templates in a nice way.

Such a platform requires pluggable add-ons. Elixir can achieve that but it’s not trivial, and security can definitely be an issue.