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Cactus Foundation is a website platform. It gives you a fast, flexible website with pages, navigation, user accounts, a visual design system, and a growing library of add-ons (modules) - and nothing you don't need.
Everything visitors see is built and customised through an admin area that only you can access. Managing your site day-to-day requires no coding.
If you manage a Cactus site and want to know how to use it, start here:
| Page | What's in it |
|---|---|
| Getting started | Setting up a brand-new Cactus site |
| Managing pages | Creating, editing, and publishing pages; the drag-and-drop page builder; available blocks |
| Appearance and design | Colours, fonts, layouts, header, footer, and starter templates |
| Managing media | Uploading and organising images and files |
| Managing users | User accounts, roles, and permissions |
| Members | Visitor accounts, sign-in, profiles, and admin management |
| Modules | Installing and managing add-ons |
| Gazette | Writing, scheduling and publishing blog posts, with tags, series, comments and reactions |
| Boards | Running a discussion forum, with polls, moderation and a phpBB/Discourse importer |
| Directory | Map-based listings with categories, featured entries, geocoding and a CSV importer |
| Product Attributes | Letting shoppers filter your shop by material, colour, room or anything else you choose |
| Shop Filters | Grouped filters for big catalogues: one Blue covers every blue-ish upholstery colour, and filtered cards show and open the blue version of each product |
| Product Discovery | A guided buying flow: type, then sort, then features, with every option explained and compared side by side |
| Product 3D views | Letting shoppers turn a product round in 3D instead of squinting at one photograph |
| Product downloads | Putting the manual, the spec sheet and the drawing on the product page for anyone to take |
| Product Add-ons | Offering screens, trays and other products alongside a product, sized and coloured to match, bought together as one tidy basket group |
| Reviews | Customer reviews on your product pages, moderated by you, with replies, verified-purchase badges and optional invitation emails |
| Advanced Shipping | Live delivery dates on every product and basket line, plus paid delivery-and-assembly options picked per item |
| Address Lookup | Shoppers type the first line of their address at checkout and the rest fills itself in, via Ideal Postcodes |
| Pay With Atoa | Pay by bank at your checkout: the shopper approves the payment in their own banking app, no card and no card fees |
| Pay via WorldFirst | Send shoppers to WorldFirst's own payment page and bring them back; the order confirms itself when WorldFirst says the money is in |
| Stock Imports | Keeping stock counts in step with a supplier's stock file, on a schedule you set, or on demand from the Products page |
| Google Shopping | A Merchant Center feed with every variation as its own listing - give Google one address and the catalogue keeps itself up to date |
| Abandoned Carts | The baskets nobody finished, with whatever the shopper typed into the checkout before they went, plus optional reminder emails - all behind your cookie banner |
| Quotes | Quoting instead of (or alongside) selling: save-a-basket codes, a quote-only shop with no checkout, a designable quote document and a PDF |
| Space Planner | Customers draw their own room to scale, put your furniture in it in 2D and 3D, and find out what fits before they spend anything |
| Modular Configurator | Shoppers build a sofa or bench layout from a modular product's units in 3D - corners and all - and buy the whole arrangement in one go |
| Contact form | A contact form for any page, with an admin inbox, replies and per-person signatures |
| Reply Catcher | Threading real-mailbox replies back into the contact form inbox |
| Twilio | Call forwarding for your Twilio numbers and sign-in codes by text message |
| Gemini Watermark Remover | Retired - no longer available to install |
| Google AI Studio | One Google AI Studio key, and the site can make pictures for you - starting with product photographs built from the ones you already have |
| Google Tag | Measuring what your site achieves: visitor numbers in Google Analytics, and orders counted against the adverts that earned them, all behind your cookie banner |
| Ultimate SEO | Site-wide SEO scoring, page analysis with one-click fixes, crawl audits, sitemap and robots controls |
| UK Bookkeeping | Keeping the books, filing your VAT return with HMRC, and working out your accounts and corporation tax from those same records |
| Purchase Orders | The buying side: who you buy from, the orders you send them, what turns up, what goes back, and their invoice checked before you pay it |
| Social Hub | Facebook and LinkedIn pages in one place: what you have posted, and new posts written, scheduled and published from the admin |
| Configuration reference | Every setting in the admin panel, explained |
If you're setting up a new install, building modules or themes, or need to understand the internals:
| Page | What's in it |
|---|---|
| Getting started | Prerequisites, cloning, environment variables, first deploy, setup wizard |
| Running locally | Running Cactus on your own machine for development |
| Architecture overview | Request flow, auth, sessions, media pipeline, module system, page builder internals |
| Authoring a module | Building and publishing a Cactus module from scratch |
| Authoring a theme | Building and publishing a Cactus theme from scratch |
| Self-hosting and operations | Backups, monitoring, recovery procedures, Cloudflare Worker setup |