What free, non-PHP CMS would work for a magazine site with articles and photo galleries?

Ghost could work if you mainly want a polished publishing experience for articles. It’s much less flexible for custom content types and galleries, though, so I’d only choose it if the magazine is mostly text with occasional images.

WordPress does fit these requirements technically, but if avoiding PHP is a firm requirement, I wouldn’t force it. A static setup with Astro, Eleventy, and a frontmatter-based editor will give you the same content structure with fewer hosting and plugin concerns.

Payload is worth checking out if you know some TypeScript. It’s very flexible and can model articles, galleries, authors, categories, and tags properly, but it’s more of a developer-oriented system than an idiot-proof one. Strapi is another self-hosted option, although the setup is heavier than an Astro-based site.

Pair Astro with Decap CMS or Keystatic if you want an easier editing interface. The content can stay as Markdown and frontmatter in a Git repository, so there’s no surprise hosting paywall and you still control all the fields. This is a good compromise between a visual editor and a simple, portable content setup.