Extremly simple "static" PHP blog that renders markdown posts. No installation or database needed.
Tired of complex blog setups, vendor lock-in or all the WordPress drama?
To create a post just write a new .md file. Everything else just works.
Note: It's not a full blogging platform, does not currently come with any premade themes, it's just a script and specific folder structure to load and display markdown files.
You can see a usage demo here (the blog is integrated into an existing site).
You already have a site and want to integrate a blog within it.
I asked others for recommendations, but most suggestions involved some complex stand-alone blogging platform or service.
I just wanted a simple way to create and display blog posts on my existing site.
The solution came together by combining several suggestions received in the post mentioned above with some of my own ideas:
- Write blog posts in Markdown.
- Preview Markdown while typing directly in VSCode.
- Use a PHP Markdown parsing library to load the
.mdfiles on the fly. I used Parsedown. This means that no database is needed, there is no build step and you can easily version posts using git. - Use
.htaccessrewrites for nice blog post URLs.
- PHP 5.4+
- Apache (or other .htaccess compatible web server)
Copy the markdown-blog folder to a PHP server.
You can also change the name of the folder, normally you would name it blog so you can access it like yoursite.com/blog.
You can create new posts by adding new post-url-slug.md files in the posts folder.
The post must start with a # Heading, which will also be the title of the post and used in the <title> tag.
The advantage of having something simple like this is that it's really easy to customize.
There are not really any default styles, as this is meant to be includded on your own site, which means it will inherit the CSS of your site. If you want better Markdown styling you can search for existing Markdown themes.
You can add your own HTML or CSS wherever you want. In the demo example I just added the header.php and footer.php that I use on the other pages of my static site.
The md-styles.css is just used to stylize the Markdown preview in Visual Studio Code. You can safely remove it, but having one means that you can preview your blog post in VSCode with the exact styles as on your site.
You are right! It's not static as in just plain HTML served from a server. But if you think about it, even a plain HTML site is hosted on a server which dynamically responds to HTTP requests.
I personally still consider it to be "static" because:
- I use Cloudflare on top of it with cache everything option, so requests do not reach my server, Cloudflare always responds with plain HTML/CSS, without executing the dynamic PHP code that processes the markdown.
- The servers that the client reaches are the Cloudflare servers, where the static assets are indeed served directly as-is.
- Content is written in a static file and doesn't change between requests.
- There is no database or content generated based on dynamic data (the only dynamic part is the URL, but it always points to the file name, the same as with static sites).
- There is no build step. If it's needed you can easily add a build step that simply saves the generated HTML output, thus making it truly satic. But now Cloudflare is already doing this.
What exactly makes a website "static"?
⚠️ Security: Fix XSS issue with 404 posts. Thanks to @Pinky for the report.⚠️ Security: Fix potential path traversal issue with 404 posts.- Add 404 Not Found HTTP header to 404 posts (for better SEO and user experience).
- Display post creation date in blog posts list
- Add ability to sort the blog posts list (default: newest first — sort descending by file creation date)
- Added automatic generation of RSS feed. By default it can be accessed at /blog/rss.php
- Added settings.php file, holds basic configuration options and RSS channel details.
- Added some helper function to getPostsList (used in rendering posts and RSS feed).
- A few codebase improvements.
MIT
Blog, PHP Blog, Markdown Blog, WordPress alternative, Ghost alternative, PHP Markdown
This is the app for which I needed and created this blog project:
Self-hosted analytics plaform with heatmaps and full session recordings.
