WordPress reigns supreme in the world of CMS, covering more than half of all websites written on CMS and about 30% of websites worldwide. The reasons for this are not only its ease of installation, free availability, and huge collection of plugins and templates. It is also an excellent marketing strategy for a free system.
However, despite all its advantages, WordPress cannot be the ideal CMS for everyone.
Burdened by its versatility and large and ever-growing code base, WordPress is increasingly seen as a clumsy behemoth, inefficient, slow, and vulnerable to security breaches. No wonder – with such widespread use, WordPress CMS is one of the first targets for hackers, because once they find a vulnerability in WordPress, they gain access to millions of sites at once!
There are tasks for sites where using a CMS like WordPress is pointless and ridiculous. For example, landing pages.
For people with small websites (from one to a couple of thousand pages), it is worth considering a flat file CMS — a CMS without a database. Unlike WordPress and other well-known database-based CMSs, CMSs without a database store website content as simple text files. This offers clear advantages for a certain class of tasks.
Why use a CMS based on text files without a database?
Flat file CMS reverses the long-standing trend of CMS using databases such as mySQL to store website content. Instead, blog posts and other created content are stored on the server as text files. The pros and cons of this approach are as follows:
- Installation and deployment are much easier, with no need to install a database. Usually, only an FTP client is required.
- Scales well even on shared hosting with much lower resource requirements. No database queries – higher response speed.
- Easy to switch from one host to another. Just transfer the files.
- Generally more secure, with fewer entry points for attacks.
- Reliable version control with GitHub.
Cons of database-less CMS:
- For most modern text-based CMS, it is quite difficult to learn at first due to the need to understand template and style languages, primarily Liquid, Twig, and Markdown Language.
- Smaller community and fewer plugins compared to more popular CMS such as WordPress.
- For very large sites with tens and hundreds of thousands of pages, with thousands of clients per hour, there is a lag in speed compared to CMS with a database.
Each is good for its own task.
Of course, these characteristics vary depending on the specific database-less CMS. Let’s take a look at free open source CMS.
GRAV
- Open source and built with Symfony and YAML
- Has a built-in package manager for one-click installation
- Supports HTML and markdown content
- Uses Twig templates for customization
- Very versatile platform features
In 2018, the GRAV platform is one of the most powerful, multifunctional flat file CMSs. Intelligent content caching provides Grav with high speed and scalability when working with a large flow of clients on the site.
Developed by the design company RocketTheme, Grav offers an impressive set of themes, plugins, and skeletons (ready-made solutions for websites of various purposes).
The GRAV admin panel is overly complex for inexperienced authors and is more intended for web administrators. Even choosing templates in the admin control panel is not that easy, which makes the work even more difficult for authors.
A feature of Grav is the concept of modular pages, in which a page consists of several subpages (modules). This is great… but also quite difficult for beginners.
Despite these limitations, you should have Grav on your list — it’s truly one of the most powerful modern database-free CMSs.
Pico
- Open source, free database-free CMS
- Uses Twig and Markdown languages to change themes and format content
- Edits site content as text files and metadata using YAML.
- Lots of themes for instantly changing the look of your site
Pico is an incredibly fast flat-file CMS for developers. It is undoubtedly easier to work with than GRAV.
Installing Pico requires little more technical skill than simply uploading some files to your hosting.
It is a smartly designed, modular, and secure CMS. It uses Twig and Markdown for theming and content formatting, respectively.
The beauty of Pico lies in its simplicity. Everything in Pico is implemented through text files. The main configuration of Pico is defined within a single text file, and to create a new page, you create a new file. That’s it.
