My website is powered by Concrete5 and WordPress. I develop professionally sites in Drupal. Now, I am considering migrating my blog and site to Pico. It is an interesting landscape, these “flat-file” CMS systems.  There are a few very exciting looking pay-to-play products, Statamic and Kirby. However, Pico is free, uses an MIT license, and is built by the folks at Dev7 who seem to make nice products, and frankly it looks good out of the box as well.

I am a happy vi user so using a product name pico has a bit of an internal dig built into it. There are several other free flat-file systems out there as well. What I find intriguing about Pico is that it uses the twig template system. The twig system is what powers the themes in Drupal 8 so there is a good chance what I learn in Pico will be applicable to my D8 theme modifications and vice-versa.

What all of these systems use for text entry is Markdown. I am slowly beginning to see the convenience of it though HTML isn’t difficult for me, learning Markdown has been a process. Making lists with an * or headings with ## is quite cool. I’ll be able to adapt.

Pico’s code seems to be fairly stable too. The github issue page is fairly active and folks are making pull requests. This is what makes choosing a new system difficult, trying to answer the question of will it be around in the future? One way to make sure it sticks around is to take the plunge and give it a try.

Deliberating still…