A few days ago I completed my work on a new project and it is now available for download at GitHub. ShinyBlog is a lightweight Blog/CMS application entirely based on markdown files. Of course the software is free and open-source.
Motivation
Until recently this website was based on TextPress which also is a markdown based blog engine. Unfortunately the software does not seem to be maintained any longer and was missing some features so I decided to build an alternative. Of course there is lots of other Blog/CMS applications out there like. e.g Wordpress or Grav. But most of these applications are much to bloated for a simple blog like this one.
This is why ShinyBlog is super lightweight. It was developed with simplicity in mind. There is no composer, no install-script and very few vendor-libraries were used. This way the code stays extremely simple and clean which makes the software extremely low maintenance and secure. It (hopefully) simply works. If not: Create an issue at GitHub ;)
Features
Here are some of the features I implemented:
Markdown based
The whole system is based on markdown flatfiles. So adding a new artcile to your blog is nothing more than uploading a new textfile to your server. You can even use your existing deployment system if you like.
Theme support
The application includes a very basic theme but you can easily build your own. Just copy the existing "kiss" theme to a new folder and adjust the CSS and/or HTML. Themes can be swiched using a simple config file.
RSS Feeds
All articles can be displayed within an RSS feed. Additionally there are RSS feeds for each article category. This way visitors can filter articles of a special category in there RSS reader.
SEO support
There are some basic SEO settings available. You can define title and meta-descriptions for each article/page. Additionally you can define noindex/follow stuff via config file.
Misc
- Pagination: Set how many articles you want to show per page.
- XML sitemap: Sitemap of all articles and pages is automatically generated.
- Excerpts: Using a read-more tag in your articles you can define the excerpt to appear on the blog-page.
- Clean Code: Well documented, PSR-0 and PSR-2 compatible PHP code.
So if you are interested in an extremely simple blog engine like you see it right now on this website you should check out ShinyBlog. Have Fun.