FlatPress

This project is under heavy developement.

FlatPress is a really, really simple CMS.

CMS are very complex pieces of software today. They have a database, a template system, a big and great backend… but all that stuff overload the server for really simple sites.

With FlatPress you only have to write the contents of your site with the directory structure you want. After that, run make and your site will be generated with the same directory structure, and the server will serve it as static HTML. No database needed or a big backend. Only a text editor.

Dependencies

FlatPress needs this packages:

A shell (like BASH).
make to build the complete site.
pandoc to convert between MarkDown and HTML.
git (optional) to deploy the Makefile.

Deployment

In order to deploy the first time a site built with FlatPress you have to follow the next steps:

Get/clone the FlatPress respository in the directory you want (for example in /var/www/my-flatpress-site).
Run make create-layout the create the basic directory layout of FlatPress.
Write your site's contents into site directory (site/articles directory for articles/posts, site/pages for pages and site/aside for sidebar/aside contents as Markdown files. You can optionally use Pandoc's Markdown or deploy any other repository with your site's contents.
Configure the document root of your web server to the public directory of your site's directory (for example DocumentRoot "/var/www/my-flatpress-site/public").
Run make in the FlatPress root directory.

Usage

Once the site has been created, you have to do the next scripts to publish contents:

Write contentes under site/contents directory as markdown.
Run make.
Done.
What else?

Lacks and limitations

Due to this is a CMS without backend and a complex publishing workflow, there are some lacks and limitations I am trying to solve:

The articles/pages have not yet user ~~and date~~ information. The writer is the responsible to write this information into the Markdown file.
Templates are very limited. You have a header, main contents, footer and aside blocks within you HTML. It is a good oportity to be very imaginative with your CSS and Javascript.
~~Although the pages menu is dynamically built, the aside part is still static.~~
The menu can only go in top part of the page, not in the aside part.

Credits

Created by Diego Lago González

Version 0.1

GPLv3 — 2014

diegolagoglez / flatpress