BEdita is both a Content Management System and a Web development framework.

It has been released officially in May 2009 under Affero General Public License version 3 and it is freely downloadable from the official web site www.bedita.com or some common Open source online networks (Sourceforge, Freshmeat or Ohloh).

Current version is 3.0 Release Candidate, released on 01 September 2009; version 3.0 stable is expected to be available during this autumn.

BEdita was created and is currently developed by two Italian companies, ChannelWeb srl and Chialab srl.

In the words of the authors, BEdita is a "object-oriented Semantic Content Management Framework (SCMF), a system where every element is an object with its properties, its connections, in its context".

As a Framework
BEdita is built upon the well-known PHP development framework CakePHP: as a framework itself, BEdita actually extends CakePHP adding many features through more controllers and helpers and the Smarty templating engine. It also combines some presentation technologies, such as JQuery, with the aim to supply a set of ready to use tools.

From CakePHP BEdita derives the Model–view–controller paradigm: the multi-tier architecture assures the separation of data modelling, data flow/control and its visual presentation. Inside BEdita every information is stored in an object oriented manner. Upon this abstraction, the developer can build as many custom relations as needed by the project.

As a CMS
BEdita is also a complete content management system, since it already comes with a multi-language back office application, able to manage several kinds of data: the CMS presents a number of modules, each related to a type of content. It is able to handle documents, multimedia objects and galleries, events, news, address books, blogs, bibliographies, newsletters and more out of the box.

All this content is managed in multiple languages, geo-localized and organized through different strategies: hierarchic tree, custom categories and tags.