NationForge: A Self-Hosted Admin Panel for Civic Organizations

NationForge is a Laravel 12 application from Kévés János that bundles the day-to-day operations of a political movement or community group into one admin panel you run on your own server. The Community Edition is released under the MIT license, and the team keeps a live demo available to try before installing.

Organising groups often run their contact lists, event sign-ups, and fundraising across a patchwork of spreadsheets and third-party services. NationForge brings those pieces together in a single Laravel codebase that you host yourself, keeping supporter and donor data under your control rather than a vendor's.

What's Inside

The Community Edition ships the core modules that a campaign or chapter tends to need:

Contacts (CRM): A people database with a status workflow, photo uploads, custom fields, activity logs, donation statistics, and lead scoring.
Groups: Community, Campaign, and Chapter group types with privacy levels, real-time chat, file sharing, and a shared calendar.
Events: Meetup, Rally, and Webinar types with RSVP tracking, public registration, QR code check-in, waitlist management with automatic promotion, and online payment through Stripe or Barion.
Email Campaigns: HTML and Markdown composition, audience segmentation, drip sequences, and open/click tracking via the Resend API.
Donations: Donor records, recurring donations, public donation forms, and accounting export.
Projects and Tasks: Team assignment, a timeline view, and task comments.
Dashboard: Stat cards and Chart.js charts, plus scheduled email reports.

Access is governed by role-based permissions (Super Admin, Admin, Editor, and Member), an audit log, and invitation-based registration. For connecting to outside services, NationForge includes outgoing webhooks across 12 event types, Google Calendar and iCal sync, Facebook Events sync, and support for Zapier and Make.

Under the hood, it runs on Laravel 12, Livewire 3, Tailwind CSS, and Spatie's Laravel Permission and Media Library packages.

NationForge ships translation files for English, German, Hungarian, Romanian, and Slovak. Its default locale is Hungarian, and at the time of writing, parts of the admin interface may still contain untranslated Hungarian strings, so the multi-language coverage is not complete but will hopefully be fixed soon.

Getting Started

NationForge is a full application you clone and run, not a package you pull into an existing project. You will need PHP 8.2 or newer, Composer, Node.js 18 or newer, and MySQL 8+.

git clone https://github.com/programozas-kft/nationforge-community.git
cd nationforge-community
composer install && npm install
cp .env.example .env
php artisan key:generate
php artisan migrate
php artisan storage:link
npm run build

The repository also provides a composer run setup shortcut that combines the install steps. See the README for the full configuration details.

Community and Pro Editions

NationForge follows an open-core model. Everything described above ships in the MIT-licensed Community Edition. The project also points to a separate Pro Edition that adds features such as advanced analytics, multi-tenant and white-label hosting, two-factor authentication, a REST API, document storage, a survey builder, petition collection, and volunteer hours tracking, along with priority support and managed hosting.

You can read the source, file issues, and try the demo through the NationForge Community repository on GitHub.