I've wanted for a long time to create a simple way of blogging that eschews basically all bells and whistles. Many "flat file" Content Management Systems exist already, as well as "static site generators", but none of these that I looked at were simple enough for my liking.

I don't want to have to install Ruby, or Python, or Composer, or whatever else on a server to run a blog. On the other hand, installing WordPress or one of the other popular PHP-based CMSes for this use case is like hammering in a nail with a sledgehammer.

Many people dislike PHP, and while it has its warts, I like it. I like using (vanilla) PHP simply because it is nearly ubiquitous. Having to install or configure it is often unnecessary because it is usually already installed, configured, and running.

I wanted to use plain text files, but some formatting is nice -- Markdown was the obvious solution for this, since it offers quite a lot of options in terms of text formatting, without sacrificing the readability of the plain text itself. I was not keen on adding dependencies but I found Parsedown which offers Markdown parsing by including a single PHP file. I can deal with that.

That's really all there is to it -- dead simple PHP-based templating, and Markdown-formatted plain text content.

I know I'm probably forgetting about a million edge cases, but I want to keep it simple. So, we'll roll with this for now and add features as they become necessary.

Installation

Download the files and upload them to a webserver somewhere. That's it!

Usage

Duplicate config-default.php as config-custom.php, and change the config variables to your liking.
Create text files with a NUMERIC file name, I use YYYY-MM-DD date-based names (e.g. 2018-10-30.md).
Format text files with Markdown, or not. Whatever. ;)
If you need to link to image/video/audio/etc. files, you can upload them to the media folder.
Upload text files to the content directory.
You're done!!

Changelog

Version 1.1

Updated Parsedown to 1.7.4
Config has now been moved to config-default.php, added support for config-custom.php
Added dark mode! Adjust the APPEARANCE constant to enable
Change default file type to .md files instead of .txt. Adjust FILE_EXT constant if needed
Reorganize folder structure (CSS and fonts are now in /src)
Small text update to /content/drafts/AboutDrafts.md
Defined $content in global scope to avoid PHP errors in some configurations
Added default favicon at /img/favicon.png
Including fonts.css in <head> instead of using @import for better caching behaviour
Added file hash query strings to <link> tags in <head> for better caching behaviour
index.php now uses <main> for content on list view and <article> on single post view
List view now explicitly sorts posts using sortPosts() function - default is sorting by filename, descending

Other Versions

User @shoaiyb has a fork going with additional features that I didn't think were "absolutely necessary" but if you want some extra bells and whistles, I recommend checking out his fork.

Attributions

Parsedown by Emanuil Rusev
Blog Icon by Gregor Cresnar from Noun Project

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paintedsky / dead-simple-blog

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