How this website is built up and why it doesn't use any CMS

[!NOTE] As it probably will be a long one, this post will be updated several times. I want this to become a full tutorial at some point but right now I just want to get this website and with it this post started. Check back later for updates. :)

As you can read in the title, this website does not make use of any kind of Content management system (CMS). Why? Because I don't think it will ever grow to a size where I would ever need a CMS. CMS are often bloated and/or include features that this website just doesn't need. I want this to be a compact and simple website that is lightweight, easy to maintain and also extensible with cool stuff that I think of along the way without tinkering with overly complicated stuff inside a CMS to get simple ideas going.

The only thing I want to use here is – surprise! – a blog functionality which usually comes with a CMS. But there is a problem with most CMS anyway: To use them on a mobile phone and comfortably write posts on it and then also publish them. Most CMS do come with a responsive design, but those more often than not are just an afterthought and really inconvenient to use.

To make writing and publishing posts on mobile as convenient as possible, I thought of Markdown. It is easy to learn and use and there are multiple ways to use it on mobile as well. For example, for this post I use an Android code editor called "Xed-Editor". You can edit multiple languages with it but also markdown. The files then can also be stored as normal .md-files.

Then, what I needed was a way to upload the created .md-files to the VPS that runs this website. And even that was easy and redundant. There are many file managers that support remote connection to a server. I personally use "Material Files" as it's very functional and beatifully designed too. With that I can upload the .md-files easily to my server.

Then, they just need to be converted to HTML via PHP and a library called "Parsedown". It is also PHP with which the rest of this website is built with. It's just the easiest way to create a simple blog with.

And that's it. Just simple PHP and Parsedown to convert markdown-files to HTML. Simple and easy to maintain. I may publish a stripped down version of this website on codeberg at some point, because I think it's a cool thing for other people to use, if they want a small and simple website with a blig as well. But for now that's the post. Check back later for some code examples and a more tutorial-esque version of this, but for now thanks for reading!