A Brief History of Wolf

Published: Mon, 11 May 2020

This short and personal narrative fills in a bit of Wolf’s story to date.¹

In the beginning…

When John Long first announced Radiant CMS back in January 2006, it quickly found a loyal following. Especially appealing were the logical, simple, attractive layout and site structure. However, at that point, Ruby hosting was still fairly rare.

Frog spawned

Just a year later, Philippe Archambault energetically migrated Radiant to a PHP environment, eventually settling on the name Frog CMS. It too grew an enthusiastic group of users, some of whom got involved more deeply in the project.

While David helped out new users in the forum and began to make some simple maintenance commits, Martijn threw his expertise into the main development of the system. He was largely responsible for the 0.9.3 release, and took Frog through a major transition culminating in the 0.9.5 release (on 27 April 2009, which remains current to this time of writing in 2011!).

Wolf is born

By this time, however, it was clear that other projects were claiming Philippe’s time and talents. In order to take the CMS forward, Martijn took the reluctant decision to fork the project, along with David continuing to provide low-level support and documentation. The decision was announced in the forum on 14 July 2009, and Wolf CMS was born.

Wolf has now moved a long way down its own development path. Although “look and feel” still show a family resemblance to Frog, Wolf is very different “under the bonnet”, so much so that most plugins are not mutually compatible between the two systems. Both owe a huge debt to Radiant, of course, which also has continued to grow over the years.

Major milestones