Phoca CMS started as an internal skeleton for a handful of small PHP projects that kept repeating the same setup: a front controller, a handful of layouts, some SEO plumbing, and a place to put content. Instead of rebuilding that from scratch each time, we pulled it into one reusable base.
What it gives you
- A layout system where every block (header, menu, sidebars, footer) has sane defaults, but happily takes whatever variables a page wants to send it.
- SEO handled centrally - title, meta description, Open Graph, Twitter Cards and JSON-LD are generated the same way everywhere.
- Content from Markdown or from MariaDB through the exact same API, so programmatic, database-driven pages are just as easy as static ones.
- A deployment that doesn't care whether it lives at your domain's root or three folders deep.
What it isn't
Phoca CMS isn't trying to be a full CMS with an admin panel, user accounts or a plugin marketplace. It's a starting point - small enough to read in an afternoon, opinionated enough to save you from making the same decisions over and over.