Getting started

Basehim is an open-source CMS that runs your website — pages, posts, media, users — and exposes all of it through APIs that other software, and AI agents, can work with directly. This page covers your first ten minutes.

If you haven't installed it yet, start with Installing Basehim and come back here afterwards. It takes about a minute.

What you actually get

Three things, and it helps to know they're separate:

• A public website — what your visitors see, controlled by a theme.
• A private admin area — where you write and configure everything. It lives at your own address with /admin on the end, so if your site is example.com you'll sign in at example.com/admin.
• An API — the same content, available to other software. You can ignore this entirely and still run a complete site, or build your whole product on it.

Publishing your first page

1. Sign in at /admin with the details you set during installation.
2. Choose Pages, then Add new.
3. Give it a title. The web address is generated from it, so "About us" becomes /about-us. You can change it if you'd rather.
4. Write your content. The editor works much like any word processor.
5. Press Publish. It's live immediately — open it in another tab to check.

Pages and posts: what's the difference?

It trips most people up at first, and the answer is simpler than it sounds.

• Pages are for things that sit still — About, Contact, Services. They aren't dated and they don't appear in a list.
• Posts are for things that stack up over time — news, articles, updates. They're dated and shown newest-first.

If you're unsure, ask whether it would still make sense a year from now with no changes. If yes, make it a page.

Finding your way around

• Pages and Posts — everything you've written.
• Media — images and files you've uploaded.
• Appearance — how the site looks. See Themes.
• Apps — extra features you can switch on. See Apps.
• Settings — your site's name, description, permalinks and API keys.

Connecting an AI agent

This is the part that makes Basehim different, and it's worth ten minutes even if you're not sure you need it yet.

Basehim speaks MCP — a standard way for AI assistants to work with software directly, rather than by guessing at web pages. Connect an assistant to your site and it can search your content, draft posts, tidy up metadata or answer questions about what you've published.

The important part is that you decide what it can reach. When you connect an agent you're shown exactly which permissions it's asking for, and you grant only those. An assistant given permission to draft posts cannot touch your settings or read your users. If something asks for more than its job needs, that mismatch is your signal to say no.

You'll find the endpoint at /mcp on your own domain. The API covers the details.

Building on the API

If you write code, everything in the admin is also available over a REST API — posts, pages, media, users, taxonomies. That opens up a few things:

• Publishing from a script or another system instead of by hand.
• Using Basehim purely as a content store behind a front end you build yourself.
• Automating the repetitive parts of running a site.

Access is controlled by scoped tokens you generate in the admin, so each integration gets only what it needs. See The API.

Three things worth doing early

1. Set your site title and tagline in Settings. They appear in search results and browser tabs.
2. Write an About page. It's the page visitors check most after your home page.
3. Set up your menu so people can reach your pages without typing addresses.

Where to go next

• Themes — change how the site looks.
• Apps — add features, and let apps expose their own tools to AI agents.
• The API — REST and MCP in detail, including how tokens and scopes work.
• Tutorials — longer, practical walkthroughs.