Feedstock is a project I thought up in late december of 09. I wanted to make a blog/cms program that would allow me to add pages news to this site and my other websites. I had previously used wordpress to handle things on
NiftyStopwatch.com and am pretty used to how it works. The thing that got me to make my own system for managing everything was the fact that wordpress ran pretty slow on my server. I do run caching and even with that and a theme that didn't have a million things going on the performance was pretty slow. Since I don't have the money to invest in some powerful dedicated server I figured I could make my own system that did everything I wanted it to do.
From there Feedstock was born. It doesn't use any frameworks to make development faster. My problem with those is I can't control every aspect of what is going on which could lead to things slowing down. Plus not using a framework teaches you a lot about how things work, which is another bonus considering that I am an undergrad in Computer Science. I built Feedstock to be quick without the need for caching, and I think I achieved that. It runs very fast on this server which doesn't have a crazy amount of power. I did write some simple caching for it. Since data on pages usually doesn't change that often it can write static files to the disk and serve those up or it can store them in the var cache of xcache for some quick serving with a burst of requests. I recently added a caching mechanism called xcacheDynamic that stores the results of sql queries in xcache. This allows themes to still be dynamic while the "content" behind them is static. This has its advantages and disadvantages. But it does speed things up a bit.
I am still working on it, adding features and making things better.
Requirements
php >= 5.2 ( should run on 5.0 but I have yet to test it on that)
MySQL >= 5.0.7 (should run on mysql 4 as long as it supports mysqli extension in php) (there is a mysql version that I wrote but it's not feature complete)
mcrypt support in php