Do I need a CMS for search capability?

[ryanC]

Hi, I have been looking at Processwire for a while, have tried out some of the sample installations. My background is hand-coding sites in HTML and CSS. All I know about PHP is to include headers and footers, etc.  A couple years ago I adapted a static site into CMSMS, because I needed a  search function. That worked well but it’s a lot of set up for things that I could now do easier by hand. I'm much more comfortable with my own pages, I don't always want an interface (even though PW's is put together very well).

Now I’m needing search again--and Processwire looks like it’s better for hand coders. The issue is I would like to keep my sites the way I'm used to: external CSS link in the head, a folder named images where I manually type the image path. I really don't want to mess with non-html and css stuff unless absolutely necessary, and I don't want to add a bunch of php tags to my page. BUT I need to have a search function--so that's why I'm here.

Can I keep this type of workflow in Processwire? For example here’s a basic site, the way I would put it together:

Fruit-(home page)
Apples-(sub page)
Oranges-(sub page)

search in navbar: oranges

(search results page:) 
Click here to visit oranges page.

…

Page structure:

<php include header>

static html content

<php include footer>

—That is all I need. Is a CMS overkill for what I need, or would I be better off just learning how to write a PHP search myself? Thanks for any advice.
 

[Sergio]

For simple static sites you can use a javascript based approach like http://lunrjs.com/

Also, check https://www.algolia.com/ for a more powerful solution, although in this case a more complex solution to implement depending on your needs. 

[ryanC]

Very cool--thanks Sergio!

[LostKobrakai]

There's also elastic search.

Also I would advice against lunrjs if your content is not english. At least for german texts the default stopwords/stemmer combo didn't work out very well.

[ryanC]

Thanks for the link, LostKobrai!