About the Project

Is it free?

Yes. It is all free. No paid/premium version will be released and there will be no attempts to create one.

For my own worldbuilding I prefer not to use free versions of paid proprietary services, as you ultimately run the risk of having your data be taken hostage in lates upsells.

What Themes should I use?

CNS is designed to be theme agnostic. I have only tested it on twentytwentyfive and my own custom themes, but it should in principle work everywhere. Themes that overwrite global defaults may have an impact on how elements are displayed in someway or another

I like the idea but my use case requires some adjustments

CNS is modeled after my personal image of what a great worldbuilding platform constitutes – that is maps and plain wikis.

Yours might be different. The great thing about WordPress is that its modular and easily customizable. Fork the GitHub repository and adjust it to your need. It takes just a little bit of technical savvy but with a bit of help from an AI helper, you should be able to adjust the plugin to your own needs.

I will also create a guide on how to do it yourself.

Is Clouds And Spaceships the right software for me?

When creating CNS for WordPress I had the following persona in mind – worldbuilders/storytellers/mapmakers who 1. Prefer to manage their data themselves. 2. Need a high degree of customization. 3. Need an easy way to share their ideas. – of course it is not limited to this, I could e.g. also see the system working in commercial informational use cases.

In all honesty – look into a hosting service that allows you to install MediaWiki – the open source software that runs Wikipedia.

If you don’t mind your data being hosted/managed by others, I have

Why WordPress?

There were really two main requirements I identified for Clouds and Spaceships (CNS) to have an impact:

1. It has to be completely free and the user must own their data. Furthermore, the data cannot be proprietary. That is if you can export your data from a paid service, but cannot use it anywhere outside of it, it is completely useless.

2. Setup should not prerequisite any significant technical knowledge beyond what someone with basic IT literacy can figure on their own.

My first attempts at CNS was actually built in NextJS and intended for users to use Vercel for deployment to have a comparatively easy pipeline. However, as I was building it, I noticed that I spent 80% of my time not actually developing cool worldbuilding features – but rather setting up and maintaining basic user functionality. Adding some maintenance woes and I got to the conclusion that there was no way many non-technical authors would be able and willing to set it up for themselves – even with AI and detailed instructions. So I ended up abandoning the project. However, a working prototype does exist.

I still think that React/Next/Astro etc. would be a superior solution for technically versed authors, so if you want to give it a shot, please feel free to fork my concept. You can find the GitHub repo at:

https://github.com/Marian-L-M/cns-app

So why WordPress? WordPress does get a bad rep from time to time, but it is a fantastic piece of open source software. It does have its technical quirks and limitations, however it has a vast and modular ecosystem, meaning as a developer I don’t have to reinvent the wheel every step along the way. As a user you get to choose what ever extension customization you want. There is a near endless supply of information material and people with a working knowledge of WordPress. So you will never end up stranded.

Additionally, WordPress runs on even the cheapest shared hosting plan and can be installed one click and there are literally thousands of hosting providers. You don’t want to share your story? That’s also fine, local solutions like LocalWP, MAMP etc. allow you to just run it on your machine.