Frequent Asked Questions

What is Lightweight CMS?

Lightweight CMS is a content management system (CMS), which intends to build content websites.

Is Lightweight CMS Free?

Definitely, free as in both beer and speech. Lightweight CMS is licensed under MIT, feasible even for commercial websites. Currently, we have no paid services for Lightweight CMS.

What is Differences between Lightweight CMS and WordPress?

Lightweight CMS, as a flat-file CMS, doesn't rely on any relational database to store contents. Instead, posts in Lightweight CMS sites are saved in flat files, either Markdown, AsciiDoc, reStructuredText or HTML.

Why is Lightweight CMS Created?

We created Lightweight CMS to migrate some of our website from static sites into dynamic ones while retaining previous Markdown posts. Unlike static sites, dynamic websites can reflect our changes immediately, suitable for frequently modified content websites.

Which Language is Utilized to Implement Lightweight CMS?

PHP 8. We select PHP rather than another language because PHP is one of few languages that works as a both template and application language. In addition, PHP hosting services are everywhere.

Currently, many GNU/Linux distributions adapt PHP 8 while some still PHP 7. We have migrated our master branch to PHP 8.1, leaving our old code to php74 and php80 branches:

How to Run Lightweight CMS on old PHP?

To run Lightweight CMS on PHP 8.0:

$ git clone https://github.com/cwchentw/lightweight-cms.git
$ cd lightweight-cms
$ git checkout php80

To run Lightweight CMS on PHP 8.1:

$ git clone https://github.com/cwchentw/lightweight-cms.git
$ cd lightweight-cms
$ git checkout master

Non-master branches of Lightweight CMS may not contain the latest features.

Does Lightweight CMS Run on Windows?

Certainly. Many web programmers write code on Windows while deploying applications to GNU/Linux. We adapt this practice as well. Nevertheless, GNU/Linux is recommended as a production environment for Lightweight CMS.

Why does Lightweight CMS Run Slowly on Windows?

It's rather a PHP issue than a Lightweight CMS one. Consider a virtualized GNU/Linux or WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) instead.

Does Lightweight CMS Run on XXX PaaS?

Maybe not. Every PaaS owns some catches. We cannot guarantee that Lightweight CMS will run on your PaaS vendor. In contrary, a GNU/Linux VPS with PHP plus either Apache or Nginx is recommended because of simplicity.

What Lightweight Markup Languages are Supported?

Markdown, AsciiDoc and reStructuredText. Different markup languages met different use cases; hence, we support three common lightweight markup languages in our software.

Why Some AsciiDoc Templates are Modified?

Some HTML tags rendered by AsciiDocter by default are counter-intuitive for web developers. To address these issues, we modify the templates of some HTML tags while retaining the semantic structures among the HTML tags set by AsciiDoctor.