Lightweight CMS

Dual-mode, flat-file CMS powered by PHP

Features

• Cross-platform
• Use vanilla PHP as its core and template language, which is well known by virtually all web developers
• Switch between a static site and PHP dynamic website
• Build a multilingual site
• Write posts in either Markdown, AsciiDoc, reStructuredText or vanilla HTML
• Write dynamic pages in PHP
• Draft posts
• Nested sections
• Breadcrumb
• Pagination
• Table of Contents
• Interlinked tags
• Image lazy loading
• No following external links for SEO
• Sitemap generator
• RSS feed generator
• Progressive Web Application
• Asset compilation
• Asset watching and hot change(s)

Synopsis

Windows

> choco install php --version=8.1.21
> choco install composer
> choco install nodejs --version=18.17.0
> choco install rsync
> choco install sed

> git clone https://github.com/cwchentw/lightweight-cms.git mysite
> cd mysite
> git checkout master
> .\tools\bin\serve.bat

> git remote set-url origin https://example.com/user/mysite.git
> .\tools\bin\migrate.bat
> git add .
> git commit -m "Migrate to a new site"
> git push -u origin master

macOS

$ brew install php@8.1
$ brew install composer
$ brew install node@18

$ git clone https://github.com/cwchentw/lightweight-cms.git mysite
$ cd mysite
$ git checkout master
$ ./tools/bin/serve

$ git remote set-url origin https://example.com/user/mysite.git
$ ./tools/bin/migrate
$ git add .
$ git commit -m "Migrate to a new site"
$ git push -u origin master

Ubuntu

$ sudo apt install php php-xml php-mbstring php-zip unzip

$ curl -o composer-setup.php https://getcomposer.org/installer
$ php composer-setup.php --install-dir=$HOME/bin --filename=composer

Install nvm. Install Node.js with nvm:

$ nvm install 18.17.0
$ nvm use 18.17.0

$ git clone https://github.com/cwchentw/lightweight-cms.git mysite
$ cd mysite
$ git checkout master
$ ./tools/bin/serve

$ git remote set-url origin https://example.com/user/mysite.git
$ ./tools/bin/migrate
$ git add .
$ git commit -m "Migrate to a new site"
$ git push -u origin master

Why not simply another Static Site Generator?

There have been more than enough static site generators currently. It is unbeneficial to reinvent one more wheel. Therefore, we create a flat-file CMS capable to switch between a static website and a dynamic one.

Website owners prefer flat files over relational databases when feasible. Nonetheless, static sites are suboptimal for some sorts of websites, like a membership site or a mix of a content site and web application. Lightweight CMS combines the best of two worlds - PHP-powered dynamic websites with flat-file posts written in popular lightweight markup languages.

System Requirements

Back End

• Production
  • GNU/Linux is recommended
  • A web server like Apache or Nginx
  • PHP 8.0 or 8.1
  • FrontYAML
  • (Optional) AsciiDoctor (for AsciiDoc support)
  • (Optional) Docutils (for reStructuredText support). Pygments (code highlighting for reStructuredText)
  • (Optional) Perl (for global replacement)
• Development
  • Composer
  • PHP Code Sniffer (for linting)
  • PHPMD (for linting)

Front End

• Production
  • A modern browser like Chrome or Firefox
  • Normalize.css
  • Bootstrap 5
  • Bootstrap.Native
  • (Optional) highlight.js
• Development
  • Node.js 18.x
  • Gulp
  • Sass
  • Autoprefixer
  • stylelint
  • Babel
  • Flow

The dependencies mentioned here are based on default and multilingual themes of Lightweight CMS. If you adapt another theme, your dependencies of the Web may vary.

Builtin Themes

• default theme for documentation sites
• multilingual theme for documentation sites with multiple locales
• blog theme for blogs

Set SITE_STYLE in config/optionalFeatures.php or its template to blog if you employ blog theme or its equivalent; to documentation otherwise.

Usage

We assume GNU/Linux as both development and production environments. If you use Windows, see this article.

Clone the repo locally:

$ git clone https://github.com/cwchentw/lightweight-cms.git mysite

Change your working directory to root path of the cloned repo:

$ cd mysite

(Optional) Install Composer:

$ curl -o composer-setup.php https://getcomposer.org/installer
$ php composer-setup.php --install-dir=$HOME/bin --filename=composer

Install dependencies of Lightweight CMS with Composer:

$ composer install --no-dev

If you don't want to update your Lightweight CMS snapshot, you may safely remove all sample posts in content directory but not the directory itself, adding your awesome ones.

Instead, if you are going to update your Lightweight CMS copy, follow this guide.

You can run a Lightweight CMS site locally with builtin web server of PHP:

$ ./tools/bin/serve

Deploy the cloned repo to a web hosting service supporting PHP 8.0 or 8.1:

$ sudo ./tools/bin/sync-to /path/to/www

If you modify anything locally, repeat the above command to update your change(s) in a production environment.

Set the configuration of a web server accordingly. Here is a sample Nginx configuration to run Lightweight CMS sites.

(Optional) Save your local repo to a remote site:

$ git remote set-url origin https://example.com/user/mysite.git
$ git push -u origin master

Breaking Changes

See here

Copyright

Copyright (c) 2023 ByteBard. Licensed under MIT