Laziness often helps you figure out funny ways to solve problems. Put it this way. I’ve found a hack to create a lightweight CMS in PHP that uses .txt files and query strings. Yes, you publish through a URL, and the persistence happens inside a text file. Not a MySQL database. Crazy! It works.

I know it’s a little frustrating (at least for me) to login into a CMS, or your host’s FTP to change a line on your static page to something else. Well, you can do it with a simple query string. Here’s the setup. It’s not fault tolerant in anyway, but it just works!

With this idea in mind, it is possible to a create a quite useful CMS with flat files and query strings. The potential use-cases for such a system are landing pages, short messages, or static one page websites which require constant updates.

<?php

//get the password
$write = $_GET['write'];

//if password is correct
if ($write=="password") {

//get content
$current = $_GET['content'];

//store content in variable
$file = 'content.txt';

//if content is written to file
if (file_put_contents($file, $current))
{
 echo "Updated\n";
}
else
{
 echo "Failed\n";
}

}

?>

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title> Lightweight CMS </title>
</head>

<body>
<p> <?php echo $current = file_get_contents('content.txt'); ?> </p><br>
</body>
</html>