Simple publishing done well

Sir Harry Bewes

I've had a lot of fun recently playing with Typemill: it's a flat-file, Markdown-supporting CMS that can be used for lots of online publishing tasks, but has a particular focus on generating ebooks.

Typemill's visual editor, showing some demo content. It's also possible to switch to "raw mode" and edit the underlying Markdown directly.

It's worth noting here that, out-of-the-box, it doesn't seem to be geared toward operating a blog (as someone who spends a lot of time working in the WordPress space, it's natural for me to make that comparison) but, with a little work, it's certainly possible to do this and more.

  • It's a great example of keeping things simple (in case of any doubt, I mean this as a massive positive—and not to imply that it is somehow naive, incomplete or trivial): it does just enough to meet most online publishing needs, and leaves the rest to the world of plugins.
  • It is highly extensible, and some well-crafted guides and tutorials are available to guide developers through the process.
  • The simplicity also shines through when it comes to deployment and development. As a flat-file CMS, no database is needed. Also, despite having a Vue-powered user interface, the build process (to the extent there is one) amounts to running composer install—no lengthy or complex compilation step—a detail that most needn't care about, but that I noticed and appreciated.

At time of writing, the ecosystem of available themes and plugins is very small indeed, but I think we'll see a steady uptick over time. All in all, a delightfully small, clean and well-crafted solution suitable for lots of common online publishing needs.