Pico

Pico is a flat-file CMS written in PHP. It needs no database: you write pages as Markdown files with YAML headers, and Pico renders them through Twig templates, which keeps websites simple and quick to set up. It has been available since 2012 and is installed with Composer or from a prebundled release.

The project's own README carries an end-of-life notice. Development stopped a long time ago and the maintainers advise against using Pico for new websites, though they say existing sites can keep running because there are no known security issues. They warn that it was not designed for modern PHP versions and suggest alternatives such as Grav, HTMLy, Automad or Typemill.

Pico is licensed under MIT and runs on your own PHP hosting, requiring PHP 5.3.6 or newer in the documented setup along with the dom and mbstring extensions. A 3.0 alpha release and branch exist but were never finished. The maintainers invite anyone interested in taking the project over to open an issue. Anyone starting something new should treat it as a legacy option.