Regardless of how simple the functionality, what you're describing is a CMS. There are several simple ones out there that are very lightweight. Cockpit ( http://getcockpit.com ) is free, and there's also Perch and Kirby if you have a little money to spend. Each of these is well-suited for a simple use-case such as yours. Cockpit the most, but its editing UI is not the most user-friendly (but the price is right).
Some numbers would be really helpful. How much storage and how much bandwidth? What type of hosting is being used (shared, VPS, dedicated, cloud, etc)? Does some sort of budget exist?
I loathe wordpress, but I admit it is easily warped to fit whatever niche people need. Did y'all look into other options? A CMS like Cockpit might be better suited and a flatfile one like Grav or Pico might be faster and more secure. A wiki (like the AL runs) might even be a good option.
With all that said, I don't want to look like I'm the guy complaining about a bunch of people doing free work for the greater good!
If you don’t have a schema (meaning there’s no consistent structure), mongo is probably the way to go.
Alternatively, you could use something like Cockpit CMS which includes a RESTful API. This would allow you to push and retrieve information in structures called “collections” which can be uniquely defined via the back-end interface. This option would also provide you with a back-end to view and edit stored data. It uses NoSQL by default but can also be configured to use Mongo (more cpu resource usage).
I should note on the cockpit option: the documentation is scarce, so it can be challenging to set up some aspects if you’re trying to heavily modify the system. But there’s a decent community around it for help.
Does look to be mainly PHP focussed but it does provide a REST API and a JavaScript library for using the API.
But yeah not quite the same as prismic
I've been searching for exactly the same thing for a while now and not found anything that looks at the same level yet.
The one similar thing I found is Cockpit, but haven't got around to trying it out yet.
Check out http://getcockpit.com/. It's PHP based and can be installed locally by unzipping the archive into sites folder. I've tested every headless cms out and while there are some great options, I find myself keep coming back to Cockpit. I have mine setup as a subdomain on my site, but the next step is to get the online version synced up with a local copy, which would enable to work offline and then just push to the repo when I get back online. Hope that helps!
I've been having good luck working out a system with Cockpit CMS which is a pretty tiny little tool. Have managed to get cockpit to output a json file with its channel data, which I then plug into a gulp task where it marries the data with jade templates, css, and js, then pops the whole thing out into a build folder. Have been managing routing with a little Lime app that points to the static files but allows access to the admin panel for CMS. It's a little manual, but is keeping the resulting pages pretty clean and the back end user experience good. The hard bit is in getting the CMS to trigger a build. Have been handling this by making a publish stub page the user has to hit which then writes the output from the CMS to a static file then triggers the gulp build.
Have you hear of Cockpit CMS? COuld be what you want, pretty sure you can just drop it in your project because it leaves the routing up to you. It's basically just a backend where you define content types (called Collections), create the content and then fetch it like you would from an API.
Not sure if you like the global static php functions, but I'm sure you can create some sort of wrapper around it to fit into you project's codebase.
Cockpit uses SQLite or MongoDB.
Well, you need some way for your client to manage the content (if you want them to be able to do it themselves), so yeah a CMS of some kind is required. But there are a LOT of different CMS's out there, some more light-weight than others. Check out Cockpit -- it's free and plugs into your existing site/markup (so you don't need to change much to work with it), and probably the lightest-weight CMS out there.
Might also have a look at Cockpit CMS. It's yet another small CMS, but runs on SQLite. Works great for small sites, and when you need to drop in a CMS on an existing static site.
This is likely common among these small CMSs, but I think the best part is their dead-simple admin interfaces. :)
I've tinkered with too many CMSs to mention, but lately I've really become fond of Cockpit. It's a breeze to implement and self-hosted which might make me old-school but I prefer it that way. :) However, it's worth noting that it's still a young project and documentation is a bit lacking.
Essentially you define regions that are editable (whether that be datasets, plain text, images, etc.), the other plus is that your designers aren't limited to a template system.
The end users (content updaters) find the admin interface intuitive and we don't have to do a bunch of hand-holding walking through the back-end (unlike Wordpress). Overall it's a pretty flexible CMS, definitely worth taking a look at.
I have been using http://getcockpit.com/ for some weeks and I really like it. It uses sqlite as a database solution and some people frown on that but personally I like it, if that's what you're going for I recommend it.