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What is Xentium

What is Xentium

Section titled “What is Xentium”

Xentium is an open-source community platform. Out of the box you get an article/CMS site, and you extend it with plugins. The core works fine on its own. Our paid official add-ons (forum, messaging and so on) are plugins, and we don’t move core features into them.

What’s in core:

  • 🔐 Auth & RBAC: email/password login, rotating refresh sessions, flat permission groups, permissions cached in Redis.
  • 📝 Articles / CMS: TipTap editor, nested categories with access control, revisions, comments, likes, tags, full-text search.
  • 👤 Users & social: profiles, custom profile fields, follow/block, profile walls, and a progression system where levels are groups.
  • 🛡️ Moderation: reports, warnings, bans, an immutable log, thresholds and the floating ModCanvas tool. Built-in abuse detection (rapid logins, multi-accounts, registration bursts, ban evasion) opens review cases for a human. It never acts on its own.
  • 🎨 Appearance: a three-tier CSS token system, a live Style Editor, .xttheme packages, fonts and a nav manager.
  • 🧱 Layout editor: arrange blocks in regions to decide what shows up on each page, in the navbar and in the footer. You drag in a tree or right in a live preview; edits autosave as a draft and go live when you publish. Layouts are data, so a theme can’t run code.
  • 🔔 Notifications: one core service every module sends through (in-app and queued email).
  • 🧩 Plugin engine: install/enable/disable, sandboxed migrations, routes, permissions and ACP pages from plugins, plus registries you can hook into.
  • 🛒 Marketplace & licensing: per-domain licences for the official paid plugins. A lapsed licence never breaks core.
  • 🌍 i18n: English, German, Spanish, French and Portuguese bundled. The API itself doesn’t care about language.

Tech stack

Section titled “Tech stack”
Layer What we use
Backend Node.js 24, Express 5, Prisma 7, PostgreSQL 17, Redis 7 + BullMQ, Zod, Pino, argon2, jose
Frontend React 19, Vite, React Router 7, TanStack Query, React Hook Form + Zod, SCSS, TipTap
Tooling pnpm workspaces, Turborepo, ESLint + Prettier, Vitest + Supertest, Playwright, Docker Compose