Line illustration: an old website with an inactive sign, moved into an archive box labelled 2007–2013

The Original TangoCMS: An Open-Source PHP CMS and What Happened to It

Published 27 October 2026

Before this domain was about content management for dance and cultural organizations, it was the home of TangoCMS, a free, open-source content management system written in PHP. If you followed an old link to tangocms.org – from a software directory, a security database or a forum – this section explains what the project was and where to find what remains of it.

This site is not the TangoCMS project and does not continue, distribute or support its software. Everything here is compiled from publicly available information, mainly the project’s own archived pages.

In short


What	Open-source content management system for websites, written in PHP
Built on	Zula Framework, a custom MVC framework written for TangoCMS (relicensed from GPL 2.0 to LGPL 2.1 in August 2007)
Project lead	Alex Cartwright
Core developers (as credited by the project)	Robert Clipsham, James Stephenson, Evangelos Foutras
First public releases	2007 (version 1.0.6 “Osprey” alphas)
Last stable release	2.6.1 “Dodo”, late 2010
Project ended	October 2013
Taglines	“Home of the fizzy CMS” (2007), later “Powerful. Simple. Secure”

How the project evolved

2007–2008: First alphas of 1.0.6 “Osprey”, then the 2.0 “Chipmunk” line with a new release model. Support for PHP 5.1 was dropped in mid-2008.
2008–2009: Rapid releases: 2.1 “Panda”, 2.2 “Eagle”, 2.3 “Dolphin”. The project published its own security advisories (“TSA”) and fixed reported vulnerabilities in point releases.
Late 2009: Source code moved from Subversion to Git.
2010: Versions 2.4, 2.5 and 2.6. Version 2.6.1 “Dodo” was the last stable release.
2011–2013: Development slowed; the issue tracker had outages. In October 2013 the project was officially ended.

In this archive

Release history – all major versions with their code names and approximate release dates.
Security advisories – the project’s published advisories and the public vulnerability (CVE) entries that reference tangocms.org.
End of the project – why TangoCMS ended and what happened to its websites.
Migrating away from TangoCMS – practical steps if an old installation is still running somewhere.

Where the code lives today

According to the project’s farewell notice, its source code and release archives were to remain available. The code repository is on GitHub at github.com/tcm-project/tangocms (last change in 2012). The original website can be browsed in the Internet Archive.

Thank you to everyone who built and used TangoCMS. If you were involved and want something corrected or added, write to [email protected].

How this page was made: drafted with AI assistance, then checked and edited by the operator of TangoCMS. Sources are publicly available information and organizer websites. Spotted an error? Write to [email protected].