Grav VS Kirby

Another area of CMS Systems are Flat File System based CMS which I did last time not hear a lot around but there was a lot of noice in the past from Kirby CMS and Grav CMS. Instead of a database they store all there data inside files and I mostly saw more for simpler website build with it where not specific security releated user context based content where used.

I would recommend Grav or Kirby (if your site is less than 50 pages) or Craft if your site is larger than that. Craft is especially nice. I has an incredibly powerful developer experience and an incredibly refined editor experience. Those 2 don't often go together. Grav and Kirby are nice in that they give you all the nice features of a CMS, but don't require a database, so they're trivially easy to stand up almost anywhere.

So, I looked for some alternatives and stumbled upon stuff like Statamic, Grav, or Craft. The features sound super cool and it looks just awesome! Just what I need. But then there's the thing called... installation. Via package managers. npm. Composer. Terminal commands. YIKES. In my imagination, I just install it on my webspace (web hosting provider, shared hosting), similar to e.g. WordPress, and configure it right there.

Well that’s a loads of arse. In that case build something with Grav or similar static generator like Jekyll.

The CMS I use for personal projects is Strapi (https://strapi.io/). It can be used as either a dynamic CMS or static site generator and it's a powerful JavaScript backend. However, for beginners who might not want to use Wordpress, I recommend Grav (https://getgrav.org/). Instead of using a database, it uses a flat-file architecture which means your web server only requires PHP. And once you learn the Twig template system it's relatively simple to use, assuming your site needs aren't too demanding.

> I had that idea at least 1-2 years ago, and I've only recently written my first post within the past 2 months. I think I enjoy tinkering with build systems much more than writing.

This is very much an easy trap to fall into! What helped me was not sweating over the small stuff and setting up an instance of Grav, though I think that most of the turnkey blogging solutions out there would work (e.g. Ghost/Bolt as well, maybe not self-hosted Wordpress as a first option due to large surface area): https://getgrav.org/

What I really like about that solution in particular is that it is flat-file based and also has an admin web dashboard that's a separate plugin that can be enabled/disabled (some might prefer writing text files directly, with front matter and all) and has separate URL path that can be put behind basicauth (in addition to built in auth), client certificate auth or anything else.

It's not perfect, of course, and has given me the occasional headaches, but it's also good enough for my blog: https://blog.kronis.dev/

That said, I still struggle with my homepage - instead of going back through 5+ years of projects and describing all of the noteworthy ones, putting up a few galleries of screenshots, listing technologies, ordering them by relevance and also making sure that it doesn't contain too much data... it's just sitting there, on my TODO list. It's been that way for a while now.

I want it done. But I don't want to do it.

If this sounds like what you need, take a look at https://getkirby.com/ It's the tool of choice for me for smaller-medium things, it's also simple to set up and to maintain.

Another area of CMS Systems are Flat File System based CMS which I did last time not hear a lot around but there was a lot of noice in the past from Kirby CMS and Grav CMS. Instead of a database they store all there data inside files and I mostly saw more for simpler website build with it where not specific security releated user context based content where used.

If you must stay with front-end tech you can use fetch with a path rather than a url to get public files from a given dir. Maybe look into static site generators (eleventy for example) or flat-file CMSs (kirby for example).

I would recommend Grav or Kirby (if your site is less than 50 pages) or Craft if your site is larger than that. Craft is especially nice. I has an incredibly powerful developer experience and an incredibly refined editor experience. Those 2 don't often go together. Grav and Kirby are nice in that they give you all the nice features of a CMS, but don't require a database, so they're trivially easy to stand up almost anywhere.

What OP is building is not a typical "flat file CMS".

Flat File CMS are typical CMS systems (often times written in PHP) that run on the server, but use files (often Markdown/Frontmatter) as their data layer (instead of a DB like Wordpress, Drupal, etc.) – if you're looking for a really nice Flat File CMS take a look at Kirby (https://getkirby.com).

What OP is building (I think) and what others like Netlify CMS and Tina CMS do, are Frontend Applications (typically SPA) that output a set of content files, which can then be fed into a static site generator (like Next.js, Astro, Hugo, Jekyll), which will built a website from it. So it's a "smaller" concept than flat file CMS. Typically these "static CMS" only care about content and have nothing to do with templating, etc.

My vote is for Kirby.

+1 for Grav given OP's requirements. Other CMSs in this vein: Statamic, Kirby

https://getkirby.com is like Statamic, only without Laravel bloat and cheaper.