Short for STATIC BLOG, lol.
Yes, I'm serious. And yes, it's hilarious. As web developers, we went from static content sites to dynamic sites to dynamic sites that compile to static sites back to dynamic sites and now we're going back to static sites.
So this is my take on a build-able static site blog thing whatever. This is inspired by a few I've seen online, like Don Melton's Magneto.
- web developers who aren't afraid of the shell
- blogs with one author
- blogs that need only three types of pages: an index page, an archive page, and a blog post page
- blogs that need ridiculously high performance (since you'll only be serving static files)
- PHP 5.3+
- MySQL 5.0+
You have ONE DATABASE... called whatever... and INSIDE... is ONE TABLE: posts. That's it. See the create_db.sql file for info, but it's fairly simple.
Rename config.sample.php to config.php. The config.php file contains all of your standard options. Blog name. Number of posts on the index page. Database connection settings.
The build.php file does all the heavy work. It does all of the steps in one script. It...
- deletes everything currently in the output directory
- loads your header, footer, and page head templates
- builds each individual blog post page
- builds the index page while it's doing that
- also builds the RSS feed XML while it's doing that
- writes out the individual blog pages, the index page, and the rss XML to static files
- copies all the stuff in the "other" directory (css files, images, static content) to the output directory
Then it's done. In the "output" directory, you'll have a complete site.
The helpers.php file has some nice helper functions.
First, set up the database, and write your posts somewhere in HTML. Insert your posts into the database. Personally, I write my posts in Markdown or straight HTML and then paste them into phpMyAdmin. (The publishdate and lastedited fields are expecting Unix timestamps.)
Via shell, run:
php build.php
Whoa. It'll build. The results will be in your "output" directory.
Upload the contents to your web server (or Amazon S3 now that it can run sites wholesale), or if you're on your web server, point the web root to that "output" directory. That's it.
Theming this thing is stupid easy, I think. I've included most of the config options and lol.css for my fuck advocacy blog redesign, which this statiblog is probably going to replace.
Obviously before you use this on your site you'll want to go through and edit out my crap from the template files.
- a friendlier way of adding posts to the posts database, right now it's manual, which might suck for most people
- further separation of templates from the build script