About Waaseyaa

The Name

Waaseyaa is an Anishinaabe word meaning "it is bright" or "there is light." The name reflects the project's goal: to bring clarity and illumination to how we build content platforms with PHP.

Why Waaseyaa Exists

Drupal proved that an entity/field model is a powerful way to manage structured content. But decades of legacy constraints, global functions, and procedural hooks have made it difficult to evolve. Modern PHP — with attributes, enums, fibers, typed properties, and mature dependency injection — deserves a fresh foundation.

Waaseyaa takes the architectural ideas that worked (entities, fields, typed storage, access policies) and rebuilds them on Symfony components with clean interfaces, no global state, and zero legacy baggage. The result is 43 focused, composable packages that you can adopt individually or use together as a full CMS framework.

Who Built This

Russell Jones is an Indigenous developer and open source contributor. Waaseyaa grew out of years of working with Drupal and a desire to carry forward its best ideas in a modern codebase.

Read the blog series for the full story of how and why Waaseyaa came to be.

Minoo — The First Application

Minoo is the first production application built on Waaseyaa. It is an Indigenous knowledge platform for preserving and sharing cultural heritage — language, stories, traditional knowledge, and community history.

Minoo demonstrates that Waaseyaa can power real applications with complex content models, access control requirements, and multilingual needs.