frankenphp VS Kirby

Uses the new FrankenPHP server to add SSL support to your local environment

Depending on the application you can already do this. For example: https://frankenphp.dev/

File size of binaries is almost never a relevant factor. Your server running your code is probably not so constrained on disk space that it would matter. It's not like it's gigabytes, it's only ~110MB. See the assets on the latest release: https://github.com/dunglas/frankenphp/releases/tag/v1.0.0

A new player is entering the game: FrankenPHP. This is a new application server which can be used instead of Apache or nginx.

Don't follow any advice to use Apache as a reverse proxy, or bundle php with a classic web server.

There are real application servers using an event loop by now, most notably Roadrunner (https://roadrunner.dev), FrankenPHP (https://frankenphp.dev), Laravel Octane (https://laravel.com/docs/10.x/octane#introduction), Swoole Bridge for Symfony (https://github.com/insidestyles/swoole-bridge-bundle).

In general, you can do a lot with OpenSwoole or Roadrunner. They are vastly superior (in a container scenario) to any other suggestion in this thread!

And up-and-comer is https://frankenphp.dev/ which invokes PHP directly from a Go server (as a plugin for Caddy) using CGO. Not quite stable yet, but it's looking good and lots of progress has been made. Disclosure: I work on Caddy :)

Not sure if this is what you’re after but give https://getkirby.com/ a try

Personally think https://getkirby.com is the entry to beat but I guess it’s just because I’m used to it and it works incredibly well for my use case.

Check out KirbyCMS. A PHP based files-only CMS. Can also be used as headless CMS. Works on most shared hosts and doesn't need a database. You'll have to do some basic PHP for the templates, though.

I guess it depends what you need to build. I used to use Wordpress for all my personal and client projects but I then moved to Kirby[0] and I couldn’t be happier.

But I think it highly depends on what kind of projects you work on.

[0] https://getkirby.com/

I can recommend Kirby (https://getkirby.com/), a flat file PHP CMS. It’s fast, has a panel to update data and can be hosted on any basically any PHP host. Just use the quite simple PHP-templates and add CSS & JS like you already know how to do. No need to complicate things.

PHP has a lot of top tier CMSes. IMHO bunch of them are even better than Statamic. Craft CMS (https://craftcms.com/) is a lot more mature database based CMS. Kirby (https://getkirby.com/) is better at flat-file and has a lot better admin interface. Twill (https://twillcms.com/) is better integrated in Laravel and is fully open-source. Statamic mostly feels like it's sitting besides Laravel and they call themselves Laravel based for marketing.