Femto

A minimalist and efficient content management system (CMS) in PHP.

Requirements

• PHP 5.4+
• mod_rewrite or equivalent

Installation

1. Get the latest version.
2. Unzip it.
3. Upload it to your server.
4. Make sure the cache directory is writeable.
5. (Optional) customise the settings by editing index.php in the root Femto directory.
6. (Non Apache users) Set up URL rewriting to point to index.php.

Creating Content

Femto is a flat file CMS, this means there is no administration backend or database to deal with. You simply create .md files in the content folder and that becomes a page.

If you create a folder within the content folder (e.g. content/sub) and put an index.md inside it, you can access that folder at the URL http://example.com/sub/. If you want another page within the sub folder, simply create a text file with the corresponding name (e.g. content/sub/page.md) and you will be able to access it from the URL http://example.com/sub/page. Below are some examples of content locations and their corresponding URL's:

Physical Location	URL
content/index.md	/
content/sub.md	/sub
content/sub/index.md	/sub/ (note the trailing slash)
content/sub/page.md	/sub/page
content/a/very/long/url.md	/a/very/long/url

If a file cannot be found, the file content/404.md will be shown.

Text File Markup

Text files are marked up using Markdown. They can also contain regular HTML.

At the top of text files you can place a block comment and specify certain attributes of the page. For example:

/*
Title: Welcome
Description: This description will go in the meta description tag
Robots: noindex,nofollow
Flags: no-markdown,no-theme
*/

These values will be contained in the $page variable in themes (see below).

The Flags attribute let you customise how the page behaves. Possible flags are (more can be added by plugins):

• no-markdown content will not be processed as markdown
• no-theme the page content will not be inserted in your website's theme
• no-directory the page will not show in directory listings (see theme below)
• no-cache disable page content cache (see cache below)

There are also certain variables that you can use in your text files:

• femto:// - The URL to your Femto site
• femto://directory - The URL to the directory containing the page
• femto://self - The URL to the current page

For example you could link another page in the same directory like so:

[another page](femto://directory/another_page)

Themes

You can create themes for your Femto installation in the "themes" folder. Check out the default theme for an example. You can select your theme by setting the $config['theme'] variable in index.php.

All themes must include a default template named index.html.php. Pages can specify a different template by setting the template header:

/*
Title: Welcome
Template: mytemplate
*/

Below are the variables that are available to use in your theme:

• $config - Contains the configuration (e.g. $config['theme'] outputs default)
• $base_url - The URL to your Femto site (no trailing slash)
• $theme_url - The URL to the theme directory (no trailing slash)
• $site_title - Your site's title (defined in index.php)
• $page - Contains the values from the current page
  • $page['url']
  • $page['title']
  • $page['description']
  • $page['robots']
  • $page['content']
  • $page['directory']

You can also access some functions:

• page($url) - Return the page object corresponding to $url or null if the page doesn't exist.
• directory($url) - Return the directory object corresponding to $url or null if the directory doesn't exist. Use the sort method to list the directory. Pages are returned by this function without their content.

Example use:

<nav><ul>
    <?php foreach(directory('/')->sort('alpha', 'desc') as $p): ?>
        <li><a href="<?=$p['url']?>"><?=$p['title']?></a></li>
    <?php endforeach; ?>
</ul></nav>

When using the short echo tags <?= the content is automatically escaped. Use <?php echo or <?== to display unescaped content.

Cache

Femto features a powerful cache system, each page is only rendered once unless you modify it. There is also a cache in place for directory information.

You can disable the cache for a specific page by adding the no-cache flag.

/*
Title: Welcome
Flags: no-cache
*/

Plugins

See the dedicated repository.

Credits

Femto is developed by Sylvain Didelot.

It is originally a fork of Pico by Gilbert Pellegrom and make use of the following libraries:

• php-markdown by Michel Fortin.
• twig by Fabien Potencier.