Introducing Poste - a pandemic response to the question: "Why is every CMS shit?"

Poste started life as a pandemic furlough project.

Yes, I know. But keep reading.

It was a matter of ‘what can we build in a few weeks which will be fun, useful and distract from the crushing reality of the end times’. Scoped at a few weeks, myself and Tortoise’s Head of Product (and long time collaborateur) Michael Kowalski sketched it out in Figma and Firebase, topped and tailed it with a few weary Facetime calls and pushed it into the void.

We both have less hair than we should due to the CMS market, so it felt right to try to undo some of the misery CMS’s have wrought on society as a whole.

Speaking of societal misery, building Poste was a realisation that come the true end of civilisation and the inevitable grey dawn of the post-apocalyptic era, there will likely be someone, somewhere trying to desperately push their last commit on a ‘Tweetdeck but for Reddit’ clone before the wifi dies for an entire generation.

Anyway, misery aside, let’s look at Poste.

Poste is simple. It’s a CMS that’s so simple it’s homepage IS the CMS. You type, you parse the URL, you share. That’s it. After 7 days the post deletes itself (unless you choose to OAuth, and you can choose the duration - because, hey, tokens are a thing).

There’s no enforced Auth, little UI fluff, no decisions, no access levels, no imagery, no video, no ‘cards’ or ‘embeds’, no social share. There’s just your post - and it’s all entirely anonymous.

Visit the homepage, edit the home page

Edit the home page, hit POST, add your email

Add your email, generate a unique link

Get an email with that unique link, extend the post if you want to - if not the post deletes itself

And that’s about it. You can choose white on black or black on white - as can the readers of the post.

Super simple, super fast, super lightweight - everything a CMS isn’t.

Poste will be launching during a pandemic near you soon.