YiiPress Static Website Engine

The package provides a fast, file-based static website engine powered by Yii3 and PHP 8.5. Write Markdown, build static HTML, and serve blogs, documentation, feeds, sitemaps, taxonomy pages, authors, search, and assets without a database.

Requirements

• Docker and Docker Compose for the standard development, test, and build workflow.
• PHP 8.5 with required extensions when running the application outside Docker.
• ext-highlighter for native server-side syntax highlighting.

The Docker images include the required PHP extensions, including the YiiPress highlighter extension.

Installation

Create a project:

composer create-project yiipress/engine mysite
cd mysite

Build the Docker image and initialize content:

make build
make yii init

Start the development server:

make up

The preview server is available at the host port configured by DEV_PORT in docker/.env.

General Usage

Configure the site in content/config.yaml:

title: My Site
base_url: https://example.com
languages: [en]
permalink: /:collection/:slug/
taxonomies:
  - tags
  - categories
highlight_theme: "Solarized (dark)"

Create a collection in content/blog/_collection.yaml:

title: Blog
sort_by: date
sort_direction: desc
feed: true
listing: true

Write an entry in content/blog/2026-01-15-hello-world.md:

---
title: Hello World
tags:
  - general
---

Welcome to my site.

Build the static site:

make yii build

Generated files are written to output/.

Common commands:

make yii new "My First Post"
make yii build -- --workers=4
make yii build -- --drafts --future
make yii clean
make package

When using serve, HTML pages include live reload and a small edit button that opens the current Markdown source file in the editor configured in content/config.yaml.

Features

• Markdown content with front matter, collections, standalone pages, taxonomies, authors, date archives, and summaries.
• Incremental and parallel builds with cache-aware output generation.
• Feeds, sitemap, canonical URLs, social meta tags, redirects, and static 404.html.
• Native server-side syntax highlighting powered by Rust and syntect.
• Table of contents, Mermaid diagrams, video embeds, fuzzy search, asset fingerprinting, and Telegram import.
• Yii3-based web application, routing, dependency injection, middleware, and PHP template support.

Performance

Current benchmark highlights:

Scenario	Mode	Time
10 000 entries across 3 collections	4 workers	~2.8 s
10 000 entries across 3 collections	incremental	~358 ms
1 000 realistic entries	4 workers	~1.1 s
1 000 realistic entries	incremental	~108 ms

See docs/benchmarking.md for benchmark workflow details.

Documentation

Full documentation is available in docs/ and at yiipress.yiiframework.com.

• Quickstart
• Content
• Configuration
• Commands
• Templates
• Plugins
• Deployment
• Architecture

License

YiiPress Static Website Engine is free software. It is released under the terms of the BSD License. Please see LICENSE.md for more information.