Example theme for Simplified Saaze: Wendt

Here is another theme called Wendt for Simplified Saaze. The example content is from Alexander Wendt's Publico magazine.

Some key features of the Wendt-theme:

1. Responsive with media breaks for large and small screens, and for printing.
2. Top menu with submenus.
3. Two column using CSS grid, "Holy Grail Layout".
4. Multiple blogs:
   • Each category has its own blog by using filtering.
   • Each author has its own blog by using filtering.
   • Aggregate blog, i.e., the combination of the above.
5. Using the <!--more--> tag to showcase the initial content of a blog post.
6. Sitemap in HTML and XML, RSS feed.
7. WebAssembly based search using pagefind.
8. No cookies, therefore no annoying cookie banner required.

See Example Theme for Simplified Saaze: Wendt for installation, conversion, and usage.

Simplified Saaze

Simplified Saaze is a fast, all-inclusive, flat-file CMS for simple websites and blogs.

Static site builders are fast but normally have a steep learning curve and require lots of tooling to make them work. We believe building a personal site should be stupidly simple. That's why Simplified Saaze is built on the following principles.

• Easy to run - All you need is PHP8, a C compiler, and Composer
• Easy to host - Serve dynamically or statically
• Easy to edit - Edit content using simple Markdown files
• Easy to theme - Templates use plain PHP/HTML
• Fast and secure - No database = less moving parts + more speed
• Simple to understand - Everything is a collection of entries

For more info and documentation for the original Saaze see https://saaze.dev. Read Simplified Saaze for installation and usage.

Speed

The entire WordPress blog including comments has been migrated to a static site as of 01-Apr-2024. The new site has static comments but currently does not use a commenting system like HashOver. It features instant search via Pagefind using WebAssembly.

The migration, theme, and installation is explained in Example Theme for Simplified Saaze: Wendt. The migration of all the content, blog posts and comments, was done via two simple Perl scripts, less than 180 lines.

Running the static site generator on a regular basis: Converting all 770 blog posts to static with comments and dependent sub-blogs takes 5.16 seconds. In total 23,712 entries are processed, CPU is Ryzen 7 5700G. This runtime is single threaded (one core). Using multithreading this runtime cuts in half. The static site generator Simplified Saaze is known to be more than 10-times faster than Hugo, see Performance Comparison Saaze vs. Hugo vs. Zola.

The resulting static site is served three times faster than the WordPress site from Frankfurt and San Francisco as checked by Pingdom. See Performance Comparison of Wendt Website: WordPress vs. Simplified Saaze.

If you want to check the numbers, use:

composer create-project eklausme/saaze-wendt

Credits

Simplified Saaze was created by Elmar Klausmeier.

Saaze was created by Gilbert Pellegrom from Dev7studios. Released under the MIT license.