Micro Content Management System
Micro Content Management System (µCMS) is a light-weight content management system written in PHP. µCMS defines it’s pages in Markdown (.md, .markdown) files.
Its light-weight nature comes through as it not relying on too much of other technologies and thus requires no more than to set up a web server from the user. It’s light-weight nature comes at a cost though, updating the pages means uploading Markdown files to the webserver, which is not suitable for people that want to update the pages online is only possible if you visit the web server through SSH, or browse it’s filesystem through an FTP or SCP browser.
If you don’t understand any of this, then this may not be what you are looking for. It is however great for those, who don’t care much about designing their own site, want some on-hand web server experience, and wish to upload pages sharing any kind of information quickly.
Technical Characteristics
This project originally was written in early 2000’s, as a quick-and-dirty tool to quickly create a website without worrying about HTML, CSS and a consistent layout of the pages. I found Markdown a nice and simple text format to write documents with basic formatting. Taking a like for the format, I wanted to use it for building a website, and since I’ve also around that time learned PHP, I have decided to create this project.
Sadly, I’ve lost the original project files, and since I have gained more programming experience, I have decided to recreate the project, rather than find the original (and probably dated) implementation. Since it is such an early design, it is light on classes. I also now utilize Composer to define a package, compared to the original, which used none.
It uses Michel Fortin’s PHP Markdown and PHP SmartiPants libraries to render the pages.
Key Features
- File system based page creation
- Markdown Extra support
- Automatic / manual navigation list creation
- Multi-lingual site support
- Basic Open Graph Protocol support.
- Built-in syntax highlighting with Highlight.js (with default site themes only).
- Dark / light mode (with default site themes only).
System Requirements
- PHP 5.3 or later
- A webserver with optional request URI rewrite capability