🚀 Live Demo: nostalgiaphp.onrender.com
A file-based CMS for people who survived WordPress and the JavaScript framework wars.
Back in 2004, making a site was simple:
- A couple of PHP files on a server.
- Maybe a MySQL table or two.
- Edit
header.phpandfooter.phplive and hit refresh.
Then the web went sideways:
- WordPress themes turned into small operating systems.
- JavaScript discovered frameworks… then metaframeworks… then frameworks for those.
- Every site suddenly needed
npm installand a thousand dependencies just to render “Hello World.”
All you wanted was a website.
It’s not a framework.
It’s not a static site generator.
It’s definitely not WordPress.
👉 It’s a tiny flat-file CMS that:
- Uses Markdown files as your database.
- Routes everything through one
index.php. - Renders with simple templates and partials.
- Makes URLs pretty with
.htaccess.
That’s it.
- Write pages and collections in Markdown.
- Drop in partials (
header.php,footer.php). - No database. No build step. No Node.
- Runs anywhere PHP runs (which is… everywhere).
- Copy the files.
- Run
php -S localhost:8000. - Visit http://localhost:8000.
- Make pages. Done.
Because it’s the glue.
Your content lives in Markdown + front-matter. That’s the portable layer.
Write it once, and it can be rendered by just about anything:
- PHP → NostalgiaPHP + Parsedown
- Python → Flask + Markdown/Mistune + Jinja2
- Ruby → Sinatra + Kramdown
- JavaScript → Eleventy (11ty) + Markdown-it
- Haskell → Hakyll (Pandoc under the hood)
- Go → Hugo (Markdown + front-matter baked in)
The runtime doesn’t matter. The content does.
NostalgiaPHP just happens to be the tiniest, laziest way to get it on the web right now.
- Simple sites deserve simple tools.
- Markdown first, HTML if you need it.
- PHP is fine. Stop pretending it isn’t.
- If your site needs a build system, you’re overthinking it.