Cinch

Use Cinch to make a simple Web site, like this one. It expects you to know what you are doing a little bit.

Key features

DIY home page
Simple page templating
Use Markdown, HTML, or PHP
Caching

Intentionally missing features

Page editor, “dashboard”
Most stuff you might think of

In other words

A blog? No. Install WordPress? No thanks. You know how to use a text editor and upload files, but a simple page template and some caching would be nice. Most of the time Markdown is enough, but occasionally you need to do something simple in PHP or HTML. It’s 2012, this should be easy.

How to use it

Cinch does not auto-generate your home page; you provide your own index.html (or index.php).

Create a new page by creating a file in the content directory.

.txt files will be formatted by Markdown and Smartypants
.html files will be unaltered
.php files will be included as PHP code

Use the basename of the file (e.g., “cinch”) to access your page.

If you have additions to the <head> element for a single page, put them in a sidecar file with a .head extension:

cinch.txt
cinch.head

Installation

Download “Cinch” at Github.

Grant PHP write access to the cache directory.
Review .htaccess. It may be necessary to make changes.
Load your home page and follow the links to the documentation.

Future plans

Syndication support, maybe

License

This is free software. It is released to the public domain without warranty.