Adding a Book Editor to My Pure Blog Site
Regular readers will know that I've been on quite the CMS journey over the years. WordPress, Grav, Jekyll, Kirby, my own little Hyde thing, and now Pure Blog. I won't bore you with the full history again, but the short version is: I kept chasing just the right amount of power and simplicity, and I think Pure Blog might actually be it.
But there was one nagging thing. I have a books page that's powered by a YAML data file, which creates a running list of everything I've read with ratings, summaries, and the occasional opinion. It worked great, but editing it meant cracking open a YAML file in my editor and being very careful not to mess up the indentation. Not ideal.
So I decided to build a proper admin UI for it. And in doing so, I've confirmed that Pure Blog is exactly what I wanted it to be - flexible and hackable.
The book editor
I added a new Books tab to the admin content page, and a dedicated edit-book.php editor page. It's got all the fields I need - title, author, genre, dates, a star rating dropdown, and a Goodreads URL. I also added CodeMirror editors for the summary and opinion fields, so I have all the markdown goodness they offer in the post and page editors.
The key thing is that none of this touched the Pure Blog core. Not a single line.
My new book list in Pure Blog
A book being edited
How it actually works
Pure Blog has a few mechanisms that make this kind of thing surprisingly clean:
content/functions.php is auto-loaded after core, so any custom functions I define there are available everywhere — including in admin pages. I put my save_books_yaml() function here, which takes the books data and writes it back to the books.yml data file, then clears the cache — exactly like saving a normal post does. Again, zero core changes.
config/update-ignore is the escape hatch for when I do need to override a core file. I added both admin/content.php (where I added the Books tab) and admin/edit-book.php (the new editor) to the ignore list, so future Pure Blog updates won't mess with them. It's a simple text file, one path per line. Patch what you need, ignore it, and move on.
content/includes/ is where it gets a bit SSG-ish. The books page is powered by content/includes/books.php — a PHP file that loads the YAML, sorts it by read date, and renders the whole page. It's essentially a template, not unlike a Liquid or Nunjucks layout in Jekyll or Eleventy. Same idea for the books RSS feed.
Using a YAML data file for books made more sense to me, rather than markdown files like a post or a page, as it's all metadata really. There's no real "content" for these entries.
Put those three things together and you've got something pretty nifty. A customisable admin UI, safe core patching, and template-driven data pages — all without a plugin system or any framework magic.
Bloody. Brilliant.
Why this matters to me
I spent years chasing the perfect CMS, and a big part of what I was looking for was this. The ability to build exactly what I need without having to fight the platform, or fork it, or bolt on a load of plugins.
With Kirby, I could do this kind of thing, but the learning curve was steep and the blueprint system took me ages to get my head around. With Jekyll/Hyde, I had the SSG flexibility, but no web-based CMS I could login to and create content - I needed my laptop. Pure Blog sits in a really nice middle ground — it's got a proper admin interface out of the box, but it gets out of the way when you want to extend it.
I'm chuffed with how the book editor turned out. It's a small thing, but it's exactly what I wanted, and the fact that it all lives outside of core means I can update Pure Blog without worrying about losing any of it.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have some books to log. 📚