krz/php-blog

php-blog. database-free blogging app in php. articles in markdown, metadata and comments in json.

a blog should degrade gracefully over time. articles, metadata, and comments live in the git repo, not a database.

cd yourBlog.com
git clone <REPO_URL>

set the globals at the top of index.php:

$websiteProtocol = 'https://';
$shortDomain = 'yourBlog.com';

clear the sample data and posts:

cd _data/ && rm -rf *
touch comments.json && touch metadata.json
cd ../posts/ && rm -rf *
touch 001-your-first-post.md

add a metadata object in _data/metadata.json for every post. enable FallbackResource in apache .conf or .htaccess:

FallbackResource /index.php

index.php        fallback resource; routes requests, calls
                 functions, fills the template
_classes/        Comment.php, Parsedown.php (erusev/parsedown, MIT),
                 Template.php
_data/           metadata.json (one object per post), comments.json
                 (written server-side as comments arrive)
_functions/      loadJSON.php, loadRSS.php, parseMarkdown.php,
                 submitComment.php
_templates/      template.html
posts/           markdown post bodies
static/          app.css, optional prism.css / prism.js for syntax
                 highlighting

metadata object:

{
  "id": "001",
  "title": "Title of Post",
  "author": "Your Name",
  "description": "...",
  "tag": "my-category",
  "created": "2018-12-08 00:00:00",
  "modified": "2018-12-08 00:00:00",
  "link": "https://www.example.com/post/name.html",
  "published": "Yes"
}

let the web user write comments.json (apache is usually www-data):

chgrp -R www-data /path/to/website/
chmod -R g+w _data/comments.json