pcms documentation
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Table of contents

Features

Note: pcms serves my own needs (only?), so I just implement what is necessary for my projects. If something is missing, that means I just had no use for that feature.

Design Goals

  • Provide a simple site generator based on Markdown or raw HTML and a template engine. No magic.
  • Generate final content using HTML templates
  • Single binary, in-process sqlite db for indexing. No setup needed.
  • The filesystem is the URL route structure.
  • Programmer friendly, or, code-first: There is no UI! Ever!
  • No magic. Magic is opaque, it does things you don’t see directly. Magic is for wizards, not for programmers.

Implemented features

  • Web server as site generator: serves dynamically rendered content using:
    • HTML, optionally using templates
    • Markdown within an HTML template
    • all other files are just served 1:1 as content
  • Folder structure defines URL routes
  • Content is rendered using a Template engine (see pongo2 below)
  • Uses pongo2, a Django-like template engine written in GO for html/markdown files to create pages based on templates
  • SQLite-backed route index: pages and files are indexed into an in-process SQLite DB (no external dependencies, pure Go driver)
  • pcms index command: walks the source file tree and populates the index DB with page and file entries, including front matter metadata
  • DB-first request routing: all requests are resolved against the index — only indexed content is served, everything else returns 404
  • Page render cache: rendered pages are cached on disk; cache is invalidated automatically when the source file changes
  • Automatic re-indexing: individual pages are re-indexed on serve start if their source file is newer than the index entry
  • Per-page enabled flag: pages can be disabled via front matter; disabled pages (and their children) return 404
  • PageQuery() template builder: chainable query API for searching and filtering indexed pages directly from templates — supports filtering by route, parent route, metadata values, ordering, and pagination
  • generates starter skeleton
  • self-contained binary: you just need the one single binary to run a pcms site, AND to read the docs

Once-to-be-implemented features

  • API for querying and maintaining the running app
  • Async DB/filesystem sync on serve start (background re-index of new, stale, and deleted entries)
  • Page content indexing and search mechanism, based on the db-indexed content
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