Typemill: A Flat-File CMS for Informational Websites

Sebastian Schürmanns

Typemill is a lightweight and user-friendly content management system tailored for informational websites, such as documentation, knowledge bases, or any publishing project with a focus on text. One of its standout features is the ability to create professional eBooks in PDF format from your website's content. It serves a diverse audience, including content creators, documentation authors, and digital publishers.

An animated gif demonstrates the visual editor of Typemill

Typemill is built on several principles that make it an excellent choice for your next web project.

Flat-File

Typemill operates as a flat-file CMS, storing all content in simple Markdown files on the server without the need for a database. This method significantly simplifies the setup, hosting, and maintenance of the system. For instance, you can easily back up all your content files and transfer them elsewhere. You can even compress your entire CMS, along with its content and settings, and migrate it to another server with ease. Additionally, the flat-file approach enhances security by eliminating the database vulnerabilities that hackers often target.

Markdown

At its core, Typemill is built around Markdown, a user-friendly markup language that has become a standard on the web in recent years. Not only do tech platforms like GitHub utilize Markdown, but popular tools such as Slack, Reddit, and Obsidian also embrace it. Furthermore, Markdown serves as the default output format for AI chat platforms like ChatGPT, simplifying AI integration when your primary writing format is Markdown.

Multi Format

One of Typemill's distinctive features is its capability to effortlessly convert your website content into eBooks in both PDF and ePub formats. By simply installing the eBook plugin, you can easily embark on your publishing projects.

Lightweight

With a mere size of approximately 2MB, Typemill is designed to be lightweight. This results in a fast and responsive website, delivering an exceptional user experience and outstanding performance right out of the box.

Extensible

Typemill's plugin and theme architecture allow you to enhance its functionality based on your specific requirements. You can create custom themes and plugins or choose from a range of pre-existing extensions to suit your needs.

Customizable

Typemill offers extensive customization options, with numerous settings available. Additionally, all plugins and themes can be tailored extensively due to Typemill's flexible architecture. Themes can also include so-called readymades, which are predefined settings that can be applied with a single click. These features ensure that both you and your developers can adapt Typemill to meet your precise needs.

Modern and Simple Tech

Many contemporary software applications are developed using advanced technologies like Node.js or Python. While these languages are popular among developers, they often lack support from standard hosting providers for smaller packages. Typemill, however, is designed with end users in mind and utilizes technology that can be run on any standard host, even the most basic hosting plans. Built on a modern tech stack that includes Vue.js, Tailwind CSS, and the Slim PHP framework, Typemill adheres to a non-npm policy to minimize frontend dependencies and maintain simplicity.