AntCMS is a lightweight CMS system designed for simplicity, speed, and small size. It is a flat-file CMS, meaning it lacks advanced features but benefits from improved speed and reduced complexity.
AntCMS is designed for speed, with a simple backend and caching capabilities that allow it to quickly render and deliver pages to users in milliseconds. This speed is further enhanced by the use of Tailwind CSS in the default theme, which is only 25KB.
Our unit tests also ensure that rendering markdown content takes less than 0.015 seconds, as demonstrated by the following recent results: `Markdown rendering speed with cache: 0.000289 VS without: 0.003414`.
Using AntCMS is simple. First, you need an HTML template with special elements for AntCMS. Then, you can write your content using the popular [markdown](https://www.markdownguide.org/cheat-sheet/) formatting syntax. AntCMS will convert the markdown to HTML, integrate it into the template, and send it to the viewer. This process is already quick, but AntCMS also has caching capabilities that can further improve rendering times.
AntCMS stores its themes in the `/Themes` directory. Each theme consists of a simple page layout template. A theme may also have an `/Assets` folder within its directory, which can be accessed directly from the server. Any files stored outside of this folder will be inaccessible.
Here is an example of the default theme folder structure:
AntCMS stores its configuration in the human-readable "yaml" file format. The main configuration files are `Config.yaml`, `Pages.yaml`, and `Users.yaml`. These files will be automatically generated by AntCMS if they do not exist.
-`siteTitle: AntCMS` - This configuration sets the title of your AntCMS website.
-`forceHTTPS: true` - Set to 'true' by default, enables HTTPs redirection.
-`activeTheme: Default` - Sets what theme AntCMS should use. should match the folder name of the theme you want to use.
-`enableCache: true` - Enables or disables file caching in AntCMS.
-`debug: true`- Enabled or disables debug mode.
-`baseURL: antcms.example.com/` - Used to set the baseURL for your AntCMS instance, without the protocol. This will be automatically generated for you, but can be changed if needed.
The `Pages.yaml` file holds a list of your pages. This file is automatically generated if it doesn't exist. At the moment, AntCMS doesn't automatically regenerate this for you, so for new content to appear you will need to delete the `Pages.yaml` file.
The order of which files are stored inside of the `Pages.yaml` file dictates what order they will be displayed in the browser window.
It will then require you to authenticate using your AntCMS credentials and from there will give you a few simple actions such as editing your config, a page, or regenerating the page list.
The admin plugin also features a live preview of the content you are creating, but it's important to note that the preview doesn't support all of the markdown syntax that AntCMS does, such as emojis.
Note: when editing the config, if you 'save' it and it didn't update, this means you made an error in the config file and AntCMS prevented the file from being saved.
