TinyBlog

TinyBlog is a very small blog engine written in PHP.

Origin

TinyBlog grew out of frustration wrangling with Wordpress for a personal blog. Like most popular software today, Wordpress is aimed at “web-scale” enterprise users with a million viewers and dozens of authors and editors. It is a fantastic bit of engineering that is also extremely overkill for a casual blog with infrequent updates and only occasional readers.

The fundamentals of blog posting haven’t changed much since the days of Livejournal. You make a post, you can add some tags, you can edit or delete previous posts. There’s an archive, and pages of history, and that’s it.

It is stupidly complex and inefficient to require a full CMS to recreate that experience.

Design

TinyBlog does things differently. All blog pages are static .html files, containing no Javascript, and no dynamic server-side code. There is an sqlite3 database, but only for the Admin Area: it is used when making a new post or site changes, to rebuild touched pages from scratch.

Requirements

• PHP 7+
• PHP sqlite3 extension

Installation

• Download the TinyBlog release .zip to your web server.
• Unzip TinyBlog to your destination area. You may change the subdirectory name.
• Point your browser at http://www.your-url.com/TinyBlog
• Click the link to the “Admin Page”. Set up a password, and create your first post.
• That’s it!

Backup

• Copy admin/tinyblog.db to a safe location.

License

TinyBlog is licensed under the 3-clause “Revised” BSD license. Please see LICENSE for more information.

TinyBlog uses php-bbcode for BBCode to HTML translation. This parser is public domain, and an external site for it is maintained here: https://github.com/greg-kennedy/php-bbcode