twill VS SailsJS

Since you're asking for PHP, it sounds like you want a framework to build your site with, and to manage content. There's Twill based on Laravel, or Ghost and Wordpress if you want tools in that space.

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.

I've worked with Twill before, so I decided to use it for my project: an open, free system with rich features and good support. Why not? :-)

Twill is a great one for content focused admins.

PHP Headless Or you go with a Headless PHP CMS. Some options for that are Bolt CMS, Suru, Twill and ExpressionEngine. A Headless CMS doesn't have any frontend. It can provide you with a REST API or you create it in their template engine and integrate your JS stuff there. There are so many, i can't count them all. You can also search for Cockpit and Strapi.

Perhaps Twill comes close. It supports running it as a headless CMS. However, I am not so sure whether RESTful API's are provided out of the box. But it seems like the Twill (PHP) API allows you to relatively easy create the required REST API's.

I'm building something similar. Intranet/wiki site first and then later going to build the marketing site on top of it. Using Twill: https://twill.io/

So currently I set the goal for myself to learn inertia via https://laracasts.com/series/build-modern-laravel-apps-using-inertia-js and also maybe connect it to twill cms.

Twill

Sails is a realtime JavaScript framework built on top of Express. Sails offers built-in realtime communication support and a flexible routing system.

Community stats: Sails GitHub repository has an active community with 22.78k stars and 2k forks. They also have a YouTube channel with a library of useful tutorial videos.

Sails.js: Sails.js pitched itself as the MVC framework for Node.js, bringing a Rails-like experience while being database agnostic.

Disclaimer: I didn't know much about Websockets 1 week ago, all the experience I had with Websockets was when I developed a chat application back in 2016 using a JS framework that tried to be a Ruby on Rails implementation called SailsJS, so I decided to research about this technology and consumed multiple resources which I will link in this blog post and each section.

Perhaps Sails.js. They mention RoR. An Angular teacher used it to create a fast API.

I was just talking about this topic of whether we really has any Rails-influenced JS frameworks out there in the wild. And I struggled to come up with anything off the top of my head other than Sails.js [1]. RedwoodJS looks interesting, what about it in particular do you find exciting?

[1] https://github.com/balderdashy/sails

Sails JS – The MVC framework for Node.js

First hurdle. ExpressJS isn't a great framework on it's own for building web sites. You need to cobble together some combination of a view engine, templating etc otherwise out of the box you'll end up handcrafting HTML which I don't think is what you want right now. I'm not up on the latest server-side web frameworks and don't think now is the time to get into react + nodejs. So I'll just suggest Sails: https://sailsjs.com/. Follow their intro guides to get yourself a basic website with text entry.