There are so many options for a content management system out there; Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla, Jekyll, CMS Made Simple, and so many more.
They all share common mechanisms, notably some form of administration dashboard for managing that content, usually with said content stored in a database.
Others, like Jekyll, skip this, but still require a build step to generate the static website.
Markdown Master CMS is different in that there is no database; there is no authentication to get broken; there is no build procedure that content authors are required to know.
Pair this application along with a sync platform like Syncthing or Nextcloud and you can even skip the second step, by having the raw files just immediately on your desktop that automatically get synced to the web server.
This works because there are zero build steps required for deploying content with Markdown Master CMS.
When a visitor browses to a MarkdownMaster website, the client browser retrieves the skeleton HTML wrapper which will contain the CSS, fonts, and the primary CMS javascript handler along with any configuration set by the site author.
The CMS then makes a request to a backend fetch helper to retrieve a listing of all markdown pages and their metadata. This cache of files is stored in the browser's memory and is used to render listing snippets.
The next step is the CMS will match the URL requested to a markdown file in the cache and retrieve the markdown source of the requested page which will contain the full body text.
This markdown body text is rendered with Remarkable (with some special modifications), and used to replace the temporary page.
Generally speaking, this is excessive and unnecessary, as the server is already capable of rendering Markdown to HTML. The beauty of this system comes into play when browsing through the site.
When loading a new page on a Markdown Master site, the browser only has to make a request for the target markdown file, (if not already in memory), and render a snippet of the body. Since these requests for a flat file are just that, no server-side processing is required, allowing for a very fast and efficient browsing experience.
Most crawlers do not parse Javascript however, so any content rendered with JS are virtually invisible to search engines. For a website which is meant to be indexed and public, this poses a huge issue.
To circumvent this, the initial request to any .html page on the CMS will use a server-side
script to dynamically render the markdown in that file to HTML.
The main technical function of a website is to generate HTML, so it would make sense to use HTML for the content...
While this is true, it's also true that asking the user to include all the little <p> tags
in their content and to ensure that all their markup is properly escaped and closed is a monumental
ask. Even for experienced web authors forgetting to include that closing </p> tag is an easy mistake.
Markdown provides a simple solution for content authors, regardless if they may be developers, designers, or your clients who have more important things to do other than try to figure out the minutia of a CMS just to update their weekly specials.
Markdown offers a quick and simple option for documentation authors as well, where they can quickly make notes in plain text as they work on a project or task, documenting their work as they go.
These docs can then be uploaded to a Markdown Master website via a CI/CD script automatically on git push of the code via a workflow!
Additionally, for those who do need the raw power of HTML, Markdown provides support for including HTML within Markdown files natively!
<div class="blocks-3">
some content here in the first block
{.block}
more content in the middle block
{.block}
more content, an image, or a call to action in the third
{.block}
</div>