Jumpstarting into Phile
Back in the day (slowly I feel more attributed to use that phrase), I messed with PHP and MySQL to produce a passable webpage, but alas – with the passage of time, the domain along with the content has been claimed by Oblivion. It seems that everyone is running amock these days with node.js and Django - where was my own shiny webpage?
Enter Phile
It is a flat CMS - that means there is no database behind it (though
I think there is a sqlite DB hidden somewhere, but I shall dive deeper).
It uses a clever layout of PHP that enables you to create
.md files and have them appear as content in your webpage.
That’s it - no messy uploading or indexing. You wouldn’t even need a
navigation page if you wanted, as the files are linked into your page
automagically.
Phile is forked off of Pico CMS, the daddy behind the concept - but it seems to have enough quirks for people to move into an OO layout of the functions and resources and I must say, it is a pleasure to use.
Take me, for instance - I am mainly a VBscript guy in my day to day affairs. I am usually time-constrained so I like to be very careful what project I jump into. Knowing that I wanted to kick a site into life, I was about to go with one of the mainstream CMS’s (cough, django), yet the flat-file philosophy really captured me. I used to be one of those guys in college that exclusively browsed the web with eLinks and thoroughly enjoyed XFCE on a 486, so that would fall in line.
Within minutes (and within days of finding a quaint little hosting service that had mod_rewrite activated) I was up and running. It gently exposed me to Twig and rekindled the PHP interest in me, just so I can contribute back. Feel free to check out the GitHub repo, the summary of features and also James Doyle’s shindig. He seems like a smart man.
Editor’s note. You may see that this webpage is actually hosted in Octopress, a Jekyll blogging implementation with lots of handy settings in SASS and yml configurations that I recommend you check out. In the effort of looking for the most ‘static’ CMS system (if you can name Octopress one, it’s more of an advanced HTML/CSS/JS rolling engine) I was won over by its advanced configuration settings and an introduction to Ruby at the same time.see this post for updates.
I still fully recomend Phile and encourage you to help James out if PHP is close to heart.