DonkeyCMS 1.0 is out. We're officially open, and the donkey is very pleased with itself. Before the confetti settles, I want to tell you where this came from, because it didn't start as a product. It started with me being annoyed.

The blog problem

I'm Buğra. I make websites for people: sometimes built from scratch, sometimes put together on one of the website-builder platforms. I'm a designer who picked up just enough of the technical side to get into trouble.

For years I told clients the same thing: your website needs a blog. A blog is where a brand shows its personality. It gives the people who like your business a reason to come back. And it's how search engines, and now AI assistants, find out what you actually know.

Then came the awkward part: where does the blog go? I only ever had two answers. Use whatever blog tool the platform offers, or install WordPress.

The "can we add a blog?" email

My favorite situation went like this. A client wants a website, no blog needed. A few months later: "We've been thinking… can we add a blog?"

For a custom website, that meant installing WordPress next to it. The result usually looked like what it was: a second website wearing a similar outfit. A slightly different menu, slightly different fonts. Visitors notice.

WordPress is impressive, and it runs a huge part of the internet. But for "I just want a blog" it's a lot: a theme, plug-ins, updates for the plug-ins, and plug-ins to fix what the other plug-ins broke. All that weight shows up as slow pages, especially on phones. Google pays attention to how fast and phone-friendly a page is. Visitors pay even more attention.

So I made my own

The plan was small: a blog I could add to my own clients' websites. It had to use the site's own header and footer, so the blog looks like part of the website. It had to be light. And it had to do the search engine homework from the start, without add-ons.

It took far longer than I expected. A blog system looks simple until you build one. Then come the details nobody sees: addresses that never break, the data search engines read, backups, updates that don't wreck your site, images that load fast on a phone. Every release now has to pass more than a thousand automatic checks before it goes out. Donkeys are stubborn, and it turns out so am I.

Somewhere along the way it stopped being my little tool and became something other people could use.

What 1.0 gives you

  • It lives inside your website, in a /blog folder, and wears your design.

  • It's light. The whole download is about 2 MB. Our own blog posts score 100 on desktop and 91 on mobile in Google's PageSpeed test (October 2026).

  • It's ready for search and AI. The structured data, sitemap and feed that search engines and AI assistants read are built in.

  • No plug-ins. Updates take one click.

  • Moving from WordPress is easy. Even with hundreds of posts, you bring them over with a single export file: posts, categories, tags, images, and the SEO titles and descriptions you already wrote. Available on the paid plans.

  • It's yours. It runs on your own hosting, and your content stays with you.

It's for designers and freelancers, for businesses that already have a website they like, and for the growing number of people building websites with AI tools. If an AI helped you build your site, you shouldn't need WordPress just to write on it.

Come try it

There's a Free plan with no time limit. Put it on your site, write a post, and see how it feels. The plans page shows what the paid plans add.

This is version 1.0, the first official one. More is coming.

Buğra