site  news  contact

shellCMS static site generator

September 18, 2017 — BarryK

shellCMS is a static site generator Content Management System. Features include:

  • Scales efficiently to large site
  • Completely static HTML pages
  • Create and edit pages with WYSIWYG HTML editor
  • Any number of shellCMS installations on same site
  • Documentation and blog modes
  • shellCMS is a small bash shell script (1600 lines)
  • Develop locally, upload with rsync
  • Extremely easy to use
  • Optional Disqus and Twitter blog comments
  • Optional front-page for each category

Do not be hassled with the limitations and gotchas of markdown. Use a What You See Is What You Get HTML editor, very easy to use. shellCMS is especially setup to use SeaMonkey Composer (part of the SeaMonkey browser suite).

shellCMS has a "MODE" variable, that is set to either "document" or "blog". This optimizes it for either of these purposes.
You can have two installations, one set to "document" the other to "blog". "shellcms.tar.gz" comes configured like this, with the document-mode shellCMS at the top-level of the site, the blog in "news" folder.
But, very easy to rearrange any other way.

Advantages of a static site:

  • Very secure
  • Very low server load
  • Very fast page loading
  • Site "already archived'

As there is no database, your site is "already archived", on your local PC. You can very easily move to another remote host, just upload the files to it.

To see the speed, go to the Google speed test page, test "http://bkhome.org":

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/ 

...phenomenal!

News about shellCMS

http://bkhome.org/news/tag_shellcms.html 

Of course, bkhome.org/news is a blog run by shellCMS!

Requirements

Any operating system that can run bash. Almost all Linux distributions come with bash preinstalled. Maybe Mac also, but not tested.

Windows users, you have my condolences. However, it is easy to boot up a Linux distribution from a USB Flash drive. I recommend Puppy Linux or Easy Linux. Easy, and most releases of Puppy, have SeaMonkey pre-installed.

Read about Easy Linux are here:

http://bkhome.org/easy

There are other WYSIWYG HTML editors, or if you wish, use a text editor.
Regards,
Barry Kauler

Documentation

Category front-pages
Installing shellCMS as a blog
Install at top-level as document manager
Submitting a sitemap to Google
BashBlog forked to shellCMS