Made by one person. Running on thousands of sites.

Total CMS is made by Aspect Services, LLC, a one-person software company in California, USA. The person is Joe Workman: founder, developer, and the one who answers the support email. There is no sales team and no support tier between you and the person who wrote the code.

Joe Workman is the founder of Aspect Services, LLC and the developer of Total CMS. He has been building and selling web software for independent designers since 2009, and builds Total CMS solo from California.

That history matters for what Total CMS is. It grew up inside the Stacks ecosystem, where designers build sites for clients and hand them over, so the questions it answers are the ones that come up after handover: how does the client edit this without breaking it, and who keeps it running.

Total CMS first shipped in 2015 as a flat-file CMS for designers. Content lived as files on the site’s own server, with no database to provision or back up, and that has never changed.

In 2025 it was rebuilt from the ground up as Total CMS 3: a standalone PHP platform with its own admin, a Site Builder, a REST API, a command-line tool, and a built-in MCP server so AI coding agents can read a site’s real schemas and content and write back through the same validation and permissions a human editor uses. The Stacks integration is now one way to use it rather than the only way.

Your content stays on your server. Total CMS stores everything as plain JSON files you can open in a text editor, copy with a file manager, or commit to git. Nothing leaves your host unless you send it somewhere.

You buy it once. A license is a one-time purchase per domain with two years of updates included. When those end the software keeps running, on any host, for as long as you want it to. There is no runtime license check that can take a live site offline.

Agents and people go through the same door. An AI agent editing your site uses the same schemas, validation and access groups as a human editor. There is no separate, weaker path for automation.

The code is there to read. Total CMS is proprietary and source-available: the code is public on GitHub and installs from Packagist, so you can see what runs on your server before you trust it.

The community forum is the fastest route for most questions. For licensing, billing, or anything private, email support@totalcms.co — it goes straight to Joe. The support page has both plus a license lookup, and the press kit has boilerplate, logos and a fact sheet if you are writing about Total CMS.