DAoC CMS – An Open-Source CMS & Tool Ecosystem for DAoC Freeshards

Hey guys,

I don't normally post here — usually I'm more of a reader — but after working on this project for around nine months, I think it's finally time to share it with the broader DAoC community.

First of all: we all know that Dark Age of Camelot is an old game. But the Freeshard community has kept it alive for more than two decades.

I've been part of that community for many years myself, both as a player and as an Admin/GM on several Freeshards. I've played on servers like Uthgard, Ariadolis, Thidranki Classic, I50, Phoenix and quite a few others over the years.

One thing I always felt was missing was a proper integration of the game server into a broader Freeshard ecosystem.

Eden is a good example of what is possible here. Their website isn't simply a place to read news — they integrate actual game functionality into it. Their PvE shop, for example, can interact with characters and deliver items directly into the game, and several other systems connect the website and the game much more closely than traditional Freeshard websites did.

That idea fascinated me.

So instead of building another generic website template, I started developing something specifically around DAoC.

Today I'd like to introduce DAoC CMS.

DAoC CMS is an open-source CMS and administration platform built specifically for Dark Age of Camelot Freeshards. It supports both Dawn of Light (DOL) and OpenDAoC, is released under the GPLv3, and is designed to connect the website, database, game server and community tools much more closely together.

What is a CMS?

A CMS — Content Management System — is essentially the software behind a website that allows administrators to manage content without manually editing pages every time something changes.

DAoC CMS goes quite a bit further than a traditional CMS, though.

It doesn't just manage pages and news. It understands DAoC databases and can interact with characters, guilds, items, mobs, world data and, through optional bridges, even the running game server itself.

The goal is to provide a central platform around which a Freeshard can build its website, administration tools and community services.

What are the features of DAoC CMS?

Some of the major features currently include:

• Dawn of Light & OpenDAoC support
• Complete installation/setup system with automatic environment and database checks
• Herald with character, guild and realm information
• Integrated PvE database
• Item Editor
• Mob Editor, including spawn and world-position editing
• Loot management
• Patrol Route Editor
• Suit Creator for creating and exporting complete equipment templates
• Interactive RvR map
• Keep ownership and relic information
• Account and character integration
• Server status and player information
• Integrated Spike Forum
• News and content management
• Theme and styling system
• Translation system
• Discord integration and bot support
• Game-server bridges for live interaction between CMS, Discord and DAoC
• Live event infrastructure
• Administration Control Panel
• Role and permission management
• Two-factor authentication
• Security auditing, CSRF protection, rate limiting and additional production-hardening features
• API and webhook infrastructure for external tools
• Support for extensions and additional services

A major design goal is that these aren't isolated little tools.

For example, an item in the PvE database can be connected to mobs or merchants. World information can be visualized. Character and guild information can come directly from the server database. Optional server-side bridges allow things such as Discord and ingame systems to communicate with each other.

The CMS is intended to become the web-side foundation of a Freeshard ecosystem, rather than simply being another DAoC-themed homepage.

Dawn of Light & OpenDAoC

DAoC CMS supports both major open-source DAoC server implementations:

Dawn of Light
and
OpenDAoC

The installer lets you select the server core you are using and the CMS contains compatibility layers for differences between their database schemas.

Supporting both projects is important to me. DAoC CMS isn't intended to compete with either emulator — it is built around them.

Open Source

The entire project is open source and released under the GNU General Public License v3 (GPLv3).

That means Freeshard developers are free to inspect it, modify it, build their own modules and adapt it to their server.

One of the things I'd really like to see in the future is other DAoC developers building extensions, integrations and tools around it.

Download

The project is available on GitHub:

DAoC CMS
GitHub: Darku11/daoc_cms

Releases are available through the repository's Releases section.

Documentation

I've also started building dedicated documentation covering installation, configuration and the individual tools/modules.

Documentation:
https://aldhran-server.eu/cms_doc.html

The project website can be found at:

https://aldhran-server.eu

After roughly nine months of development, I finally feel comfortable putting it in front of the wider DAoC community.

Just to clarify one thing regarding AI, since the question has come up a few times: yes, I did use AI in some parts of the project, and I made no secret of that in my release post on the Aldhran Discord. A lot of the code is written by myself, though, and many of the systems involved considerably more work than simply giving an AI two or three prompts.

The description of the landing page and parts of the documentation are AI-generated. I provided the information and used AI to turn it into proper documentation, because documentation writing is simply not something I particularly enjoy. In that regard, it did a very good job.

I'm not trying to convince anyone to use the project or to change their opinion on AI. I simply wanted to share something I built with the community of a game I love. That's it. :)