sharing a new permacomputing-inspired website making tool

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Lichen-Markdown is a new take on "the simplest possible CMS for the web that is friendly enough for non-technical users".

It's a light-weight low-power CMS — composed of just a few PHP files, that can easily run on small devices with little overhead.

Lichen-Markdown is a fork of the Lichen project that works with Markdown instead of Gemtext.

We made a website with more info about the project here -->

https://lichen.commoninternet.net

@notplants super cool to see somebody still interested in this!

ty to sensor station for making the original lichen (https://codeberg.org/stringbone/lichen/src/branch/master), and @abekonge and @soapdog for making the fork and adding other improvements

permacomputing is always about compromise, balance, and creativity,
so different folks may have different opinions on whether Markdown or Gemtext is sufficient for their project

@notplants all best to you, but isn't using generated static site even more lightweight? don't want to sound mean, I'm using Yellow (similar project) for my own site

hi @albi thanks for sharing. yellow also looks interesting and has a lot of similarities, but also some differences.

for instance with lichen you can edit the header of the page directly through the browser, not just through the text editor. yellow also appears slightly more feature-rich and lichen is a bit more bare-bones, for better and for worse depending on what you want. but both interesting imo and sort of slightly different takes on a similar idea

and yes changing lichen to statically generate the pages instead of to render them in real-time via php would use fewer computing resources. they actually did change to this for the later version of lichen written in forth, and we were considering doing the same for lichen-markdown

we actually have an open issue for this (https://codeberg.org/ukrudt.net/lichen-markdown/issues/12)

but thanks for commenting and sharing, and this is all to say I agree

@albi and even if we add static site generation when you click save, to make the site use less resources when serving pages

i think it still might make sense to keep the live-rendering feature for the sake of the what-you-see-is-what-you-get editor, which i think is a cool feature of lichen

@albi also curious have you tried or seen some other tools similar to yellow? and what did you think? if you feel like sharing

@notplants for sure, keep the dynamic version for the convenience
I've chosen Yellow exactly because it was minimal, modular and yet didn't require other users to set up Git or Syncthing pipelin to edit pages
there were also Grav and Pico CMS, but they had too much needless JS in them