Stralo is a modular CMS-like software suite consisting of over 30 modules. At the Republic, we use Stralo to create web content: websites, portals, collection management systems, media asset management systems, etc.

We've built Stralo from the ground up. It doesn't really rely on any particular web-framework. Instead, we decided to build it from scratch around open standards and a few central paradigms:

Semantic

The core concept of Stralo is Linked Data. This means that all data is stored and published in a very structured way so that it can be interlinked and become more useful through semantic queries. This also means a Stralo server tries to interlink and understand the data it has in store. Much like a human tries to understand by linking many different memories together.

The semanticness of Stralo goes beyond it's technological implementation. It's a philosophy we imprinted into Stralo's DNA. For instance, next to eg. storing all information in a triplestore, we have built in native support for machine learning, grid computing, distributed storage, etc so it's able to reason about it's knowledge.

The ultimate goal of Stralo is to create a CMS that not only structures it's data according to international linked data standards, but truly understands what information it has in store.

Modular

We're a Belgian media company and specialize in developing software for the A/V sector. We have a very good, but tiny dev-team, which basically means we need to maximize our programming efforts as much as possible. For one, we find it hard to keep track of the fast-paced release cycles of a multitude of external frameworks and libraries. Once you have a shiny new release back-ported and tested, a new one pops up. This is why we decided to bite the bullet and write Stralo from scratch, only relying on stable, industry-proven - but sometimes not so hip - 3rd party libraries with slower release cycles.

Another future-proof-decision we took is to split Stralo up into a lot (30+) of small modules instead of developing it as one big framework. This offers us very fine-grained version control and drastically improves the time efficiency of our developers. See our GitHub page for all modules.

Holding on to the modular-thought, we also decided to split pages into little modules or "blocks". Each page consists of a number of standardized Web Components that make up both the content and the design. By marrying the modular version control with the modular blocks-concept, we are able to control the release cycle of the blocks that make up Stralo webpages.

Simple

Ever since we started working on Stralo, we wanted to keep things simple by avoiding a "back-end". This means editing content in Stralo should be as easy as in any word processor: you can click, type and drag-and-drop everything you see. And what you see is what your visitors see. This means that - contrary to other content management systems - you don't need to log in to a back-end admin section to alter your website by filling in a form. You just surf to the page you want to modify, click the edit button and start editing.

Next to editing the content of a page, we also wanted to be able to edit the look and layout of a page. Again, without the need of a back-end or a webdesigner. So we integrated a drag-and-drop layout and styling system that enables you to reorder and style any page, all within the bounds of a well-designed theme.