Testing Ratals CMS on real hosting

I installed Ratals CMS on shared hosting and walked through the same path a new user would take: download, database setup, installer, admin login, media, pages, and HTTPS.

What stood out:

• The installer works once PHP, MySQL/MariaDB, and server rewrite rules are in place
• MariaDB needed a collation tweak versus MySQL 8 defaults
• Media uploads create many image variants; large files can feel slow at first
• Page editing currently expects HTML (WYSIWYG is noted as coming soon)
• Switching to HTTPS required updating URL settings and clearing page cache so assets stopped loading over http

This post is part of a live product test of Ratals before wider promotion.