Aloia CMS

AloiaCMS is a drop-in flat file CMS built on top of Laravel. You won't need to rebuild your entire application to be able to offer CMS capabilities, you can simply include the CMS as a library and start writing.

The goal of the project

The goal with the project is to create a content management system, but give the developer ultimate freedom. So the CMS doesn't put any limitations on where you should serve the files and how you display them. This is all customizable. The only thing the developer needs to do is tell the CMS where the files are. That's it. All it does is keep files up-to-date between the browser and the server.

How is the website built?

The website is created using Jekyll and is hosted on GitHub pages. This allows me to update the website by simply pushing commits to GitHub. Everything is done automatically: hosting is done by GitHub and even an SSL certificate is issued through GitHub pages. This means I focus on the content and new features, without having to think about anything else.

I had looked at hosting a website on GitHub pages before and it seemed easy enough, but I didn't want to mess around with static HTML files, as most code needs to be duplicated on all of the pages. This is why I never really gave it a serious consideration. This was until I discovered Jekyll.

I had heard of Jekyll before, but it was very daunting to me, because it's a Ruby Gem and I'm a PHP developer. But I thought: "How hard can it really be?". That was the right approach, because it turned out, it's extremely simple.

Getting the first few pages online was a breeze and the development process is very pleasant.

Documentation

Besides serving as a landing page website, the website also contains documentation. Writing this documentation is an ongoing project, but the website serves as a place where you can find any official plugins, extra resources, and detailed documentation for the CMS. You can find the documentation by clicking here.

Tools used

I used the following tools to create this website:

• Jekyll
• GitHub pages
• SCSS (+tailwindcss)