php-terminal-cms a document is an ordered sequence of typed lines

php-terminal-cms

date: 2026-10-04

A micro publishing platform built on one idea: a document is an ordered sequence of typed lines, not a blob of text. You compose the lines in a terminal-styled editor that runs from a file, and about three hundred lines of PHP turn the markdown it exports into this page.

noteThis site is the software's own example content. Everything you are reading lives in content/ as markdown, and the whole installation is a directory you copy onto a server.

The two halves

The editor on the left, a static page; the published site on the right, PHP rendering each request; between them one markdown file, copied by hand. Along the bottom, where a request goes once it reaches PHP.
The editor on the left, a static page; the published site on the right, PHP rendering each request; between them one markdown file, copied by hand. Along the bottom, where a request goes once it reaches PHP.

They never talk to each other. The editor cannot write to the server, and the server cannot be written to from the internet — publishing is a file copy you perform with a tool that already has your credentials.

What it is not

No database. No login. No session, cookie, form or upload. No admin panel, no build step where the host runs PHP, no composer dependency, no npm package, no CDN, and not one byte of third-party JavaScript on any page without a diagram — a page that draws one loads Mermaid, a pinned copy served from the site's own origin.