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Sangio
Sangio

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I didn't expect a template project to turn into a CMS — meet QuickSite

#ai #php #showdev #sideprojects

About six months ago — November 2025 — I started a small "make a clean
HTML/CSS template" side project. Around the same time I gave agentic AI
workflows a serious second look, and the two collided. The template grew
a JSON structure, then an admin panel, then a workflow engine, then a
visual editor, then a JS interaction layer, then BYOK AI integrations…
and somewhere along the way it became a thing.

That thing is QuickSite:

A file-based, API-first website operations platform with a visual
editor and workflow engine for deterministic and AI-assisted site
changes.

PHP, runs on Apache or Nginx, no database. JSON files on disk are the
single source of truth.

I'm sharing it now because I genuinely didn't think it would go this far.
The 1.0.0-beta.6 cycle just wrapped — interactions, CSS animations,
client-side BYOK AI dispatch, dark/light theme — and the project has
reached a point where outside eyes would help more than they'd hurt.

What it tries to be (and stay):

  • Open source forever — GNU AGPL v3.
  • Zero dependencies — works without any. The recent BYOK/local LLM integration is opt-in and ships with a no-AI fallback path so the promise still holds.
  • No lock-in — your project is plain JSON + PHP files in a folder. Walk away with it whenever you want; no proprietary export, no database to dump.
  • Reachable beyond developers — the visual editor is the primary surface. You don't need to read PHP to build a site.
  • Multi-layer learning — every visual action surfaces the underlying concept (selectors, events, CSS variables, JSON structures) so curious users naturally pick up real web fundamentals along the way. Not a black box.
  • Frontend-first, API integration coming — beta.7 wires pages to live data; beta.8 makes those pages server-rendered for SEO/AEO. Yes, AEO — when LLM-driven discovery becomes a meaningful chunk of traffic, structured server-rendered content matters even more than it already does.

I post a 1-2 week dev log on YouTube about whatever I just built — no
source code on camera, just enough HTML/CSS/JS literacy to follow along.
The latest one walks through the beta.6 interaction + animation system on
a real "filter the commands list" demo.

Repo (the README answers most of the obvious questions):
https://github.com/Sangiovanni/quicksite

Dev log playlist:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLULtElcjV8r-o8uVM9bS86ZYk0rvKuZwL

This is openly self-promotion; I won't pretend otherwise. But it's also
genuinely "tell me what breaks" — feedback at this stage is much more
valuable than stars.

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