The Problem
Creating a personal website formerly requires either an immensely complex folder tree of HTML files or an overblown CMS that does way beyond what the average user needs.
The Solution
Extend on XHTML such that a single file can describe not only a single page, but an entire website. SWS merely requires PHP5, and can optionally use mod_rewrite for pretty URLs. You don't even need access to a database.
A Hello World
template.sws
<site title="John Doe" template="default.tmpl" css="main.css">
<page link="" name="Home">
<header>My Home Page</header>
<content>
<p>Hello World!</p>
</content>
</page>
<page link="Contact me">
<header>To contact me</header>
<content>
<p>choose a medium</p>
</content>
<subpages>
<page link="Email">
<header>Email</header>
<content>
<p>superhappyfuntime@me.com</p>
</content>
</page>
<page link="IM">
<header>IM</header>
<content>
<p>IM superhappyfuntime</p>
</content>
</page>
</subpages>
</page>
</site>
default.tmpl
<html>
<head>
<title />
</head>
<body>
<div id="alllinks" />
<h3 id="header" />
<div id="content" />
</body>
</html>
main.css - Your run of the mill CSS stylesheet (empty for this example)
Features
- No maintaining a file tree. Want a new page? Add a page element to the site tag.
- No compiling required
- Automatic clean URL generation (assuming you have mod_rewrite enabled)
- Automatically generated links (and nested links)
- Templatizing of standard HTML - no new syntax required
- Virtually infinite nested pages
History
- January 3rd, 2010 - Static Compilation added, added a rewrite rule to force append slashes
- December 24, 2009 - Initial Release
Known Bugs
Relative URLs calling other pages aren't correcly substituted if mod_rewrite is not enabled (ie, if you have "/?p=" in your URLs, you need to directly address them for now)