SimpleMD Website Engine

The SimpleMD website engine is intended for very simple, text-based websites. The idea is to install SimpleMD on your server and then maintain your website entirely inside a markdown file tree, which will completely eliminate the high overhead of using a database for your website.

The root directory of SimpleMD contains three directories. When you edit the public_html/index.php file, you will find several options at the top; make sure the options are set as you want them to be, save the file, and close. You'll be ready to go!

You'll likely also want to delete this file and the other temporary markdown files in the content directory, as you'll probably not want them to be a part of your website.

Directories

/   
|
|- /content
|
|- /simplemd
|  |
|  |- /simplemd/templates
|
|- /public_html
   |
   |- /public_html/assets

These directories contain resources for the website. By default, the directory structure is configured to keep the php source code (in /simplemd) and the markdown source documents (in content) out of the publicly-accessible portion of your webserver's file tree. If you need to change any of these paths, be sure to update the paths inside index.php in your document root.

simplemd houses all the php code for the website, including the simplemd engine and the php markdown library. It also contains the templates directory, in which you can create and edit your various website templates.

public_html contains all your non-text content for your website. Please note that if any path exists in both this public_html directory and in your content document tree, the content from public_html will take precedence and will be displayed.

All stylesheets, images, and other supporting content should go in the public_html/assets directory, in an appropriate subdirectory.

The content directory should house all your markdown documents, in the tree structure you want your URLs to use.

Templates

As stated before, the simplemd/templates directory contains the site template resources that SimpleMD uses to render your page to the browser. If you'd like to build your own template, just create a directory inside simplemd/templates with a file called template.php; then change the template setting in your /index.php file to match the directory name, and you're all set!

You can optionally include a 404.md file inside your template directory if you'd like to customize the text of your 404 page.