pupupu - simple static CMS for crappy servers

Static website generators are awesome because of two reasons:

• the website is fast and secure because no code is running on the server
• developers can use all their favourite tools (e.g. text editors or git)

The big downside is that usability for non-developers is poor because they usually do not know about text editors and git.

Lektor calls itself a "static content management system". It is a static website generator, but it also has a web UI to edit the source files. This way, it feels a lot like a CMS while maintaining most of the benefits of a static website generator.

Unfortunately, many hosters still only offer PHP. So Lektor, which is written in python, is not an option.

So here I present: A simple static CMS for crappy servers!

Quickstart

• Get the latest zip file from https://github.com/xi/pupupu/releases
• Unpack to your webserver
• Create your templates in a folder called _templates/. For starters, you can copy an example theme from pupupu/themes/. Don't forget to add some CSS!
• Open https://yourdomain.com/pupupu/ in a browser
• Start creating your content!

Documentation

Folder Structure

The following files and folders are relevant for your project:

• /pupupu/ - UI for editing
• /_templates/ - template files
• /_templates/default.html - default template
• /_content/ - source files
• /_content/_site.yml - contains site-wide config
• /_content/_users.yml - password hashes
• /files/ - uploaded files

Content

For each page, there is a corresponding yaml and markdown file in /_content/. The template can be defined in the yaml file using the _template key. If none is specified, default.html is used.

Each time a page is saved in the UI, it automatically regenerated. If the site config is saved, all pages are regenerated. If a page uses the API to include content from other pages, you can add it to _dynamic in the site config to regenerate it each time any page is saved.

Files and Folders

Most pages will be represented as a folder containing the files index.yml and index.md. This will generated a folder containing index.html. Browsers can skip the index.html part, resulting in nice URLs.

Still, there are some cases where you need to control the file name. For this reason, a different pattern is used if the page name contains a dot: If you create a page called "feed.xml", the corresponding files are called feed.xml.yml and feed.xml.md and will generate feed.xml. (Pages that have a dot in their name can consequently not have subpages.)

Templates

Twig is used as templating system. The following variables are available in a template:

• path - path to current page
• page - the data from the page's yaml file
• body - the contents of the page's markdown file
• site - the data from `/_content/_site.yml
• pupupu - an interface through which you can access arbitrary data (useful for feeds or index pages). Please refer to the source code for a list of methods.

There are also some special filters available:

• md - render markdown using PHP Markdown Extra
• shift_headings - useful to fit user-generated content into the document outline