Requirements

SimplyEdit itself will work with any webserver, as all the code runs in the browser. But the quickstart templates have some code running on the webserver itself. These templates are meant to help get you up and running quickly, using the most common webserver setup there is: Apache (2.4) with PHP (5.6 or 7+).

If you have no web server or host yet, you could take a look at the list at http://b2evolution.net/web-hosting/budget-web-hosting-low-cost-lamp.php for some cheap options. These sites all make it very easy to get started.

You don't need a database or a CMS to use SimplyEdit.

Create your homepage

If you have the hosting sorted, the next step is to create a homepage for your website. You can create a complete site from scratch with just plain HTML and CSS, but its a lot quicker if you download the example website from https://simplyedit.io/quickstart/.

Unzip the contents in the directory immediately above your website root directory. You'll see something like the following list of files:

.htaccess
index.html
assets/
data/
    data.json
files/
img/
templates/
    index.html
simply-edit/
    check.php
    filesystem.php
    http.php
    login.php
    logout.php
    prerender.php
    router.php
    store.php

Follow the steps outlined at https://simplyedit.io/quickstart/ to get your website ready to edit:

1. Get a trial key from https://simplyedit.io/. You can get one for free, it will work for 30 days. You can only get a trial key once for each separate website though.

2. Edit the index.html file and enter your trial key in the simplyedit script tag at the bottom.

3. Edit the .htpasswd file and replace the default user with one of your own. If you don't know how to do this and your hosting provider doesn't have a solution for you, you can try this htpasswd-generator.

4. Run the simply-edit/check.php script and fix any problems you find.

Now open the site in your web browser. It is just a standard website. Now click on the 'Edit me' link. If you used a different template, you can always start the editor by appending '#simply-edit' to the URL. Now you can edit your website.

Where is your data?

SimplyEdit works different from almost all other CMS systems. Instead of a lot of code and a database that all run on the server to create and render your page.

A SimplyEdit website only stores your data in a single file on the server. The HTML page contains just enough information to tell SimplyEdit what your site looks like. Then SimplyEdit grabs your data and uses this data to fill in the placeholders in your HTML and render your website.

This all happens in your browser, not on the server.

If you take a look behind the curtains and view the source of your web page, you'll see that none of the editing changes you made are actually in there. All these changes are instead stored in the file data/data.json. If you open this file, you'll see all the changes you made. Now forget about it and close it. You don't need it anymore.