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Blog — building in the open

Notes from the workshop.

Design decisions, MCP workflows, templating milestones, and honest write-ups as we build toward 1.0.

Progress

Build log — where Birkly actually is, August 2026

What is shipping, what is mid-flight, and what is not built yet. Written so you can tell which is which before committing anything real to it.

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Philosophy

The core stays free — how Birkly plans to make money

Open source projects that never answer this question tend to answer it badly later. Here is where the line sits, why we drew it there, and what would have to go wrong for it to move.

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Engineering

Three primitives, six different sites

A blog, a shop, a social feed, an event site, documentation and a portfolio — modelled with the same collections, entries and fields. Where the plugins pick up, and where they do not.

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Engineering

A template language you can read out loud

Template syntax is usually optimised for the person typing it. We optimised for everyone who reads it afterwards — including the ones that are not human.

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Engineering

One script tag, no migration

Adopting a CMS normally means rebuilding your site first. Birkly attaches to the site you already have — and this is how the two connection modes actually differ.

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AI

The Agent Guide: what your site tells an AI about you

AI systems are already answering questions about your product. Right now they are inferring the answers from your marketing copy. The Agent Guide lets you state them instead.

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Philosophy

Hello, world — why Birkly exists

Every CMS we tried asked us to give something up: our content, our stack, or our sanity. Birkly is what we built instead — and this is the argument it rests on.

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AI

Writing with an agent, staying in charge

Most CMSs let AI write straight into published content and call the Approve button oversight. We put agent writes in the same review queue as public form submissions — and this is what that actually changes.

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Engineering

Nested entries: content that mirrors reality

Collections, entries and fields are the whole content model — plus one more idea that does most of the work. Why sub-collections beat reference fields for anything that owns something else.

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Philosophy

Why we chose plain PHP in 2026

The least fashionable decision we made is the one we are most confident about. On boring technology, code that still runs in ten years, and why the qualities that help a junior developer also help an AI agent.

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