PHP Markdown Server

A minimal PHP router that serves HTML by processing Markdown files.

Who is this for?

• You have PHP hosting
• You want to upload Markdown files to create new web pages
• You don't want a build process or log-in system
• You can build the templates with PHP
• You want a system you can understand in 5 minutes, easily extended by you or an agent

Install

git clone git@github.com:mrclay/php-markdown-server.git
cd php-markdown-server
./start-local.sh

# to stop
./stop-local.sh

Directory /backend/public

Contents of this directory should be in the document root of the site. _router.php will handle non-file requests, and handles most logic for rendering pages.

Directory /backend/md-server/pages

If a Markdown file is placed in this directory, it will be served, but without the .md extension. E.g. the URL /foo/bar will attempt to serve the content in pages/foo/bar.md (processed and run through the templates). Use index.md for an index URL.

Markdown files

At the top of each markdown file is the "frontmatter" block. This is a YAML-formatted set of metadata that will control the page's rendering.

• title: The page title (plain text encoding). If not the home page, the site title will be appended.
• meta_description: The page's meta description (plain text encoding). Otherwise a default will be used.
• is_home: Set to true for the home page, otherwise omit this.
• sidebar: Set to use a different sidebar template (e.g. about => sidebar-about.php).
• body_class: Adds CSS classname(s) to the body element.
• main_class: Adds CSS classname(s) to the main element.
• file: If given a path (relative to md-server/files), the Markdown is ignored and instead the file is included using PHP and the output is placed in the page.
• increase_headings: If set to true, the markdown headings like ### will be increased by one level.

The markdown content is processed by CommonMark. After that, a few replacements are made:

Extension ideas

Most of the logic is in md-server/lib.php.

As an example, I've added a snippet to replace <p>{{OTHER_ANIMALS}}</p> in the output with the output of the script files/example-replacement.php.