Hundreds of free open source CMS engines have flooded the market with new releases every year. Advancements in development have allowed for greater support among CMS devs that go far beyond general Rails or PHP. Notably the Node.js library allows devs to write frontend + backend code strictly in JavaScript – something that’s seemingly quite revolutionary for the time.

This has spurred a large movement of JS devs and pushed many new concepts like the Apostrophe CMS. It’s an open source content management system written solely in Node.js with a Mongo database structure.

The creators of Apostrophe wanted to make something easy to use and editable in-context. Check out the live Apostrophe demo to see it in action.

With admin access you have the ability to edit any text or images on the page without moving into a backend dashboard. Inline editing is a huge feature that works perfectly for non-technical clients who just want to perform basic maintenance of their website.

I’ll admit that anyone who’s unfamiliar with Node will have a very hard time learning the ropes. You really need some foundational knowledge of JS & Node before diving into Apostrophe. But if you can get through that phase you’ll be happy to learn Apostrophe has free how-tos and dev tutorials right on their website.

The core is very easy to install with full access available from the GitHub repo. Curious Node developers that want to push their boundaries may find Apostrophe refreshing and quite the exciting learning challenge.

The Node team has grown to 44 collaborators submitting ideas and bug reports on this open-source web framework. The team has just put together a final stable release of Node v4.0.0 with a lot of new features.

A big part of the new Node v4 release is a continuation of supporting features with io.js. Most notably this includes support for many ES6 features that some developers have been looking for.

ES6 is ECMAScript in it’s 6th release, basically an alternative to JavaScript but with a modern update for the 2015 dev environment.

In this case it’s not exactly used as a completely separate language, but rather combined into Node.js with support for major browsers. Node has a full documentation page for ES6 devs that includes release notes & future support.

This latest version of Node v4 has been tested on a wide array of ARM systems and processors – notably OS X, Windows, FreeBSD, SmartOS, along with many Linux variants. Plus first-class support for ARM processors allows developers to whip up Node applications that can run on a broader spectrum of smartphones.

Basically Node v4 is built to work on a vast number of devices with a whole lot more support from a developer’s standpoint.

You can pull down the latest v4.0.0 release right from Node’s download page and get moving right away. Experienced devs will have no problem jumping into new features, but newer devs should also feel comfortable learning the ropes with this latest stable release.

Also to read more about specific changes & bug fixes take a look at Node’s official blog post containing all the juicy details.

JavaScript was original created as a frontend language for dynamic website effects. Although it’s still used in this way, newer libraries are pushing the boundaries of what can be accomplished through JS scripting.

In a previous article I covered AngularJS resources for building dynamic web applications. Node.js is a similar open source library with even more detailed features.

This gallery includes 24 tutorials, guides, and websites dedicated to teaching Node.js. These resources are perfect for any developer who wants to learn more about Node, or a newcomer who just wants to see what all the fuss is about. All of these resources are free to use and should cover more than enough info to get you started building Node.js web applications.

Absolute Beginner’s Guide

Hello, World

Server-Side JS

Node.js for Beginners

Writing Add-ons

Social Authentication

Screen Scraping with Node.js

Express.js MVC Site

How-To List

Real Time Chat

Resumable Video Upload

HTTP Mock Testing

RESTful API Design

Ajax File Upload

Search Bar using MySQL

Basic HTTP Calls

Facebook Login

Managing Sessions

Node.js and MongoDB

Express.js with MongoDB

Node School

NodeCasts

NodeCloud

Realtime Node.js Webapp