// the take
Winter is a self-hosted CMS built on top of Laravel, forked from October CMS in 2021 over a governance dispute with that project's maintainers. It targets PHP/Laravel developers and agencies who want a traditional plugin-and-theme CMS rather than a headless or React-based one.
Building on Laravel instead of rolling its own framework means it inherits a mature ORM, queueing, routing and testing stack for free. The in-house Storm library sits between Winter and Laravel specifically to absorb upstream breaking changes, which is a sensible call for a CMS that has to keep tracking a fast-moving framework. CI is real (separate workflows for tests, code quality, and Docker builds) and there's a working devcontainer/Codespaces setup, so you can actually spin it up and poke at it before committing.
The backend admin UI is still jQuery, LESS, and the Ace editor — there's no modern reactive frontend, so anyone used to a Vue/React admin panel will find it dated to extend or restyle. The October CMS fork means the plugin/theme ecosystem is now split across two diverging communities instead of one, so there's less third-party content than the combined history would suggest. At ~1.5k stars it's a small project next to WordPress, Strapi, or Directus, which translates to a smaller plugin marketplace, fewer people who already know it, and less community troubleshooting when something breaks. It's also strictly self-hosted — you're on the hook for PHP, Composer, and migrations yourself, with no managed hosting option from the maintainers.
We read the README, the directory tree and a key source file in October 2026. Nobody pays to be listed. How we judge →