Specs and Docs ⋅ Our Stack
This page shows an overview of the various LOOPS content types and system components.
| System component or content category | User groups | Technology | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| Content server | System administrator | Generic web server | Any generic web server with PHP support can be used. |
| Content processing | System administrator | PHP | PHP 8.0 or higher is used for server-side content processing and file management. |
| Content creation | Technical writer | Plain text files | Documents are uploaded to or created on the server as plain text files with a Markdown (.md) suffix. |
| Content editing | Technical writer | Any (modern) Markdown editor | Documents can be edited in-system using the integrated editor (Monaco) or externally using any text editor supporting UTF-8. |
| Content – media | Designers, content creators | Images, audio, video files | Binary media files can be uploaded to the LOOPS server or hosted on another web server. The only prerequisite is a public URL. |
| Content interaction | Frontend developer | JavaScript: ripple.js | Custom stand-alone JavaScript components are used for navigation and presentation customization. |
| Content styling | Frontend developer | CSS: 9to5.css and custom CSS | All formatting is based on a slim “classless first” set of style sheets that can be modified by small override style sheets. |
| Content templating | Frontend developer | HTML / Pandoc templates | A complex Pandoc style sheet with internal variable processing logic is used for processing content and YAML metadata. |
| Content conversion | Technical writer or product manager | LOOPS + Pandoc | LOOPS custom code and the Pandoc document converter are used to transform content and templates into HTML pages. |
| File upload and download | Technical writer or product manager | LOOPS + Pandoc | LOOPS provides a dashboard supporting standard file operations (upload, download, create, duplicate, rename, delete). |
| Content access | End user | Any (modern) web browser | HTML documents with transcluded media and style sheets can be viewed by end users using any modern web browser. |
↻ 2025-08-21