Beautiful documentation, powered by Markdown. One polished theme, fast search, zero dependencies.
Pholio turns a folder of Markdown files into a finished documentation site: static HTML, one stylesheet, a few small JavaScript modules, the fonts and a search index. No Composer, no npm, no framework, no build server. PHP runs once at build time and is never needed again.
There is one theme, and it is polished down to the details: light and dark schemes, a sidebar with collapsible folders, a table of contents that follows you, keyboard shortcuts and instant search. You write Markdown; Pholio takes care of the rest.
Status
Pholio 0.1.0 builds complete documentation sites. What comes next is on the roadmap.
What you get
Markdown in, HTML out
A strict Markdown subset plus a few declarative component tags. Anything unrecognized stops the build.
Components
Callouts, cards, tabs, steps, accordions, file trees, type tables and highlighted code, each shown with its source.
One configuration file
Title, logo, navigation, start page, palette, search, redirects, profiles. Plain PHP data, validated before the build.
Ready for agents
Markdown for every page, llms.txt, skill.md and content negotiation, generated from your content.
Search without a backend
An index built at compile time and ranked in the browser, with typo, prefix and umlaut matching.
What it deliberately is not
Pholio does not read your source code. There is no docblock extraction, no API reference generation, no expression evaluation in content. Your documentation is written by you; Pholio renders it.
It is also not MDX. Component tags are data, not programs: they carry attributes, they nest, and they can't import or execute anything. New tags are registered in PHP, where code belongs.