Hi everyone,

I'm Zack Schwartz, the founder of Raytha. The Raytha team is excited to announce that we've just released v0.9.0, our beta version, to the public. You can find it on Github here. I wanted to share the history of how we arrived at this point.

I graduated from the George Washington University in 2011 with a degree in Computer Science. After graduation, I joined Tim Spell and Kunal Johar, who ran a software consultancy called NonprofitCMS. We built websites for nonprofits and associations using the Wordpress and Sitefinity content management systems. Working with Sitefinity, which was built on the .NET framework's web forms at the time, was my first experience with .NET development.

As I worked with Sitefinity, I longed for a better content management system in the .NET space. While Wordpress was (and still is) the leader in the general CMS world, we considered building our own CMS on .NET to use for new projects. However, we eventually transitioned from a web design company to a successful product company called OpenWater, leaving that idea behind.

In 2018, Kunal and I started another company called api2pdf, which helps developers generate PDF files. We sold OpenWater at the beginning of 2022 and continue to operate api2pdf today. But despite all of these detours over the years, the desire for a .NET boilerplate that could serve as a multi-purpose CMS and rapid application development framework never left my mind. It would come out of the box with features like RBAC, configurable content types, audit logs, a built-in view engine, and headless REST API. While I've seen some technologies emerge that had some of these features, like Strapi.io, Airtable, and abp.io, none of them really captured the essence of what I was trying to do.

This has been a long journey, but a rewarding one. Raytha is completely open source under the MIT license. We encourage you to check it out, critique it, contribute to it, and share it. It's for everyone. We have big plans to add more core features and make it even better. While Raytha will always be free, we do plan to offer some paid services in the future, such as support plans, guided installation, hosting, and partnerships.

We'd love for you to follow us on social media and give the github repo a star!

Happy new year!

Zack Schwartz
@apexdodge on Twitter & Instagram (DMs are open)

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