marcin-lis.pl

Decisions

I was thinking about that from some time, but in last week I decided to go with this topic. I had a feeling like I'm not using wordpress as I can. It was too much for my needs - simple blog, that's all.

So after consideration, I decided to move from wordpress into flat-file based CMS system. I didn't wanted to move into another big CMS like Drupal, Joomla, etc. I wanted something small, simple, lightweight and fast P:

Bludit

I checked my options, and after some test (thank you Oracle for your free tier in Oracle Cloud) I chose Bludit CMS as my CMS of choice.

What is Bludit? In short:

Bludit is a web application to build your own website or blog in seconds; it's completely free and open source. Bludit is a Flat-File CMS, which (in this case) means that Bludit uses files in the JSON format to store the content. You don't need to install or configure a database; you only need a web server with PHP support.

Looks simple, but it's not only a simple text files display. It supports Themes, Markdown (in fact, I'm not using TinyMCE (it's HTML Editor for formatting content, and it's recommended for the users who don't want to work with Markdown code). I'm using EasyMDE (Markdown editor) to write this text :) It also has a plugin support. That means you may extend Bludit capabilities. You may even build a shop based on this CMS XD

What is more important - it's SEO friendly. Full support for tags, categories, simple links, plus plugins which are adding additional features. And the best (from my point of view) - Bludit is GDPR Compliant. What that means? It's simple. Bludit takes care of the security and privacy of the users, and doesn't track or uses external libraries, frameworks and other resources.

Requirements

Ok, I already explain Bludit not require a database. So what is needed to run it? In short, you just need a web server with PHP support.

In more details:

• PHP v5.6 or higher.
• PHP mbstring module for full UTF-8 support.
• PHP gd module for image processing.
• PHP dom module for DOM manipulation.
• PHP json module for JSON manipulation.

Bludit supports almost every webserver:

• PHP Built-in web server
• Nginx with module ngx_http_rewrite_module
• Apache with module mod_rewrite
• Lighttpd with module mod_rewrite
• Hiawatha, rewrite rules
• H2O
• IIS with module URL Rewrite

In my case, Bludit is running on Rocky Linux release 9.4 (Blue Onyx), nginx server in version nginx/1.20.1 and PHP 8.0.30 with php-fpm

And it's damn fast. And light. And that's all what I wanted :)