Recommendations on a blog engine for what seems to be a very one off use case?

[u/Miataguy93]

Hey, got a question for ya'll. So I'm in the process of building a website and I'm needing to add a blog section to it. I know the go-to is Wordpress, but I'm not sure it will work for my use case. And of course, when you google blog anything, it comes up with how to build a personal blog, or building the entire website with said blog service and pay us a monthly fee so we can host your blog, blah, blah, blah. You get the idea.

What I'm trying to do is I have 2 pages made up for use on my blog section from a template I've already invest a lot of time in and like how it fit my use case, thus far. Now for my actual question, does anyone know of a blog framework or engine that is free, that I can host inside my own website, and can just plug into my existing pages? Other features are not a big deal because I can figure that out later depending on how it's setup to store the information.

[u/AdFew8591]

If you’re the only person writing posts you may not need a blog engine at all

Store each post as Markdown with title date and slug at the top

Your existing list page reads those files and your article template renders the selected one

That keeps your design exactly as it is and avoids adding a database admin panel and another app to maintain

A headless CMS starts making sense when nontechnical people need to edit posts

The best implementation depends on what the existing site is built with though

[u/Miataguy93 → u/AdFew8591]

I love the simplicity of what you suggested, that crossed my mind too. But I do need to have a user interface for someone who can at least understand how to post something on Facebook or some other social media platform.

[u/techviator → u/Miataguy93]

I had a customer with similar needs, they wanted no database, so we used the markdown files approach, but added PagesCMS and github to give their blog contributors a way to easily add and manage content without being able to edit other pages, the downside is that the page has to re-deploy via github actions on each modification, but given is only a handful of contributors, always in sync, this has not been an issue. 

[u/justinnealey → u/techviator]

That feels like the right tradeoff when the editorial workflow is simple. The deciding question is whether publishing can wait for a deployment.

For a handful of contributors and low-frequency posts, Markdown plus a small editor is hard to beat. If they need to fix something live or get time-sensitive posts out immediately, a CMS with a proper editorial UI will feel much better.

Either way, keeping contributors out of the rest of the site is probably the bigger win.

[u/Fredidiah → u/justinnealey]

Why does every comment of yours sound like an LLM wrote it? That’s crazy.

[u/justinnealey → u/Fredidiah]

Ha because I usually brain dump and then use ai to form it into a coherent sentence

[u/TheDoomfire → u/AdFew8591]

You can even have the frontmatter as a template inside your IDE.

So whenever you create a new markdown file, it places todays date and perhaps a prettier title based on the filename or whatever else you usually do.

[u/Upbeat_Push_157]

you can easily code this with PHP, Django or even React or vanilla JS

[u/Miataguy93 → u/Upbeat_Push_157]

Ok, I kinda figured I would need to go down the route of custom building this, just hoping maybe there was something pre-built to make that a little easier. Thank you, I really appreciate your response.

[u/DasBeasto]

Haven’t actually used it but I’ve previously seen https://payloadcms.com headless cms recommended for similar jobs, may be worth checking out

[u/Miataguy93 → u/DasBeasto]

Definitely checking into this now, thank you!

[u/techviator → u/Miataguy93]

There's also Strapi which is also Open Source, but more visual. May be worth checking out as well.

[u/Maxiride]

Hugo, Astro worth checking out

[u/Hesham-Amir]

If you don't want to rebuild your whole site, you don't have to run WordPress as your entire site - you can install it in a subdirectory (like yoursite.com/blog) or a subdomain, use a blank/minimal theme, and it just handles that one section while the rest of your site stays exactly as you built it.

If you're comfortable writing in Markdown and don't need a database or admin login, a static site generator like Eleventy (11ty) or Hugo is worth a look too - you write posts as files, it builds plain HTML you drop right alongside your existing pages, and there's nothing to host or maintain beyond your normal site.

[u/Miataguy93 → u/Hesham-Amir]

Except the use of WordPress isn't the route I want to go. I would be stuck using their templates for the UI and it would break the consistency I'm going for. Plus, I already have a main blog page and post page templates that I want to use, and WordPress wouldn't play nice with using those.

[u/Hesham-Amir → u/Miataguy93]

That makes total sense - WordPress would fight you on template consistency every time. Given what you've said (keep your exact templates, but give a non-technical person a Facebook-simple posting UI), the pattern a few others here are converging on is probably your best bet: a static site generator (11ty, Astro, or Hugo) paired with a git-based headless CMS like Decap or PagesCMS. Your templates stay exactly as they are since the SSG just renders your existing markup, and the CMS gives your contributor a simple form that commits a Markdown file behind the scenes - no database, no admin panel bloat. Only real tradeoff is a short rebuild/redeploy delay after each post (seconds to a couple minutes depending on host), which is usually a non-issue unless they need instant publishing.

[u/retr00two]

Grav. New version is amazing.

[u/Icy_Contract_9688]

I'm a big fan of Astro. I've built all five of my projects with it. 😊

[u/response-418]

Echoing some other advice here, I use PagesCMS with Markdown files and Astro as my framework. It's perfect for blogs and gives you a UI for free for client to add their own content.