What free, non-PHP CMS would work for a magazine site with articles and photo galleries?
Asked by
MellowPine47
I'm building a magazine-style website and want a CMS that is genuinely free, without important features being locked behind a paid plan. I need support for multiple content types, mainly regular articles and photo galleries, with fields such as title, subtitle or dek, featured image, author, publication date, categories, and tags. I'd prefer something that uses Markdown and frontmatter, isn't WordPress or PHP-based, and is straightforward enough for someone who doesn't want a complicated setup.
Answers
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Astro with content collections is probably the closest match. You define the frontmatter schema once, including separate schemas for articles and galleries, and it can warn or fail during the build if required fields are missing. It’s free, doesn’t use PHP, and gives you a lot of control. The tradeoff is that you’ll be building the site rather than installing a fully finished CMS.
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