Building a typed CMS for business data with PHP, OpenAPI, and MCP

In my previous article, I introduced the NeNe series: a family of small, self-hosted business tools for teams operating in Japan. Previous article: https://dev.to/hideyukimori/i-am-building-self-hosted-business-tools-for-small-teams-in-japan-4i26 This article is a deeper look at one of those tools: NeNe Records . Repository: https://github.com/hideyukiMORI/nene-records NeNe Records is an API-first typed CMS and flexible entity platform built on NENE2 , my small PHP framework for AI-readable business APIs. It is not trying to be a WordPress clone. It is not trying to run WordPress plugins or themes. The goal is different: manage business data and public content through typed schemas, documented APIs, and clear AI tool boundaries. Why not just use WordPress? WordPress is useful. It has proven that a generic content model can support blogs, pages, shops, media, and many small business workflows. But when I think about business data, a few problems keep coming back: untyped metadata plugin-specific data shapes hooks and filters that can change behavior from many places API contracts that depend heavily on plugins AI integrations that may not know where the real application boundary is The postmeta model is flexible, but it often becomes stringly typed storage. That is fine for many websites. But for business data, I usually want the API to know more: this field is text this field is an enum this field is an image this field is a relation this field is required this record belongs to this organization this operation requires this role That is the space where NeNe Records lives. Typed records instead of metadata chaos The core model is simple: Entity Type -> Field Definition -> Record An Entity Type defines what kind of data exists. Examples: posts pages products events internal documents A Field Definition describes the shape of a field: text markdown html blocks int enum bool datetime image file relation A Record is the actual data. The important part is that the schema