With PieCrust, making a website is easy as pie:

  • Simple filling: it’s all just text files!
  • Store in the cellar: your whole website fits nicely in a revision control system.
  • Bake and serve: generate a completely static website that will run with minimum resources for maximum scalability.
  • Quickly update your recipe: update your blog with git push or hg push!
  • Taste while you cook: preview your website instantly during authoring.

Get started right now in less than 5 minutes!

Quick preview

Clean kitchen

PieCrust stores everything in neatly organized text files in a _content directory:

_content/
    pages/
    posts/
    templates/
    config.yml
css/
images/
otherstuff/

Folders pages and posts contain what you expect. templates contains layouts and repetitive bits of markup. config.yml contains common things like the site’s title, and configuration settings for PieCrust.

Preparation, preparation

Create page templates and reusable bits quickly:

<html><head>
    <title>{{page.title}}</title>
</head><body>
    <h1>{{page.title}}</h1>
    <p>published: {{page.date}}
       by: {{page.author}}</p>
    {{content|raw}}
</body></html>

Quick appetizer

Create a page or blog post in seconds, with your favorite text editor, using a very natural syntax:

---
title: My rhubarb pie recipe
category: desserts
---
You're gonna *love* this one,
it's so good! You need:

- Pastry crust
- Rhubarb
- Sugar

It will be converted into typographically beautiful text automatically!

Simple at first, complex later

Mundane tasks are easy:

  • Create a text file to add a page or post.
  • Rename a file to change a page’s URL.
  • Edit a page’s file to change its title, contents, tags or other metadata.
  • Edit another file to change layout.

But advanced features give you much power to play with, from layout inheritance to macros and pagination filtering and conditional includes and so on.

Highlights

Comes with side-orders

PieCrust comes with a nice selection of text formatters (Markdown, Textile, SmartyPants) and template engines (Twig, Mustache) out-of-the-box. It supports syntax-highlighting with GeSHi, too.

It’s super easy to add other things like Haml, Sass and anything else you like!

Super-fast service

Because PieCrust is also designed as a lightweight CMS, it can render your pages in less than a few milliseconds in most cases. It means that previewing or generating your website is super fast!

Multiple entrées

Your pages are not limited to one piece of content that you place in the center of your layout. You can define other “text segments” like a page-specific menu or sidebar text that you can insert in different places in the layout.

You’re not limited to one blog either — PieCrust supports multiple blogs!

On-demand cooking

You don’t have to use static generation if you don’t need it — just use PieCrust as a classic PHP CMS that will render requested pages on the fly.