Songs4Christ docs
How Songs4Christ works
A free scripture music site: albums made with Suno, each song carrying its lyrics, verses and commentary. There are no accounts, ads or purchases.
For listeners
Listening
Albums, the player, reading along, keyboard shortcuts and phones.
For the people who run the site Admin docsEditing, publishing and hosting. These pages need an admin sign-in.
The idea in one page
An album is a folder. It holds the MP3s, a cover image and one file, album.json, with everything else: titles, lyrics, Bible verses and commentary. The site reads those folders and builds the pages from them, so publishing music means adding files, not changing code.
- Suno Several takes of each passage
- Album folder Chosen MP3s, cover,
album.json - Admin Edit the text and set visibility
- Website PHP pages built from the folders
- Player One audio player that lasts across pages
What's in the site
| Address | What it is | Who it's for |
|---|---|---|
/ | Goes straight to the Isaiah album | Everyone |
/albums/ | All albums, as a grid of covers | Everyone |
/albums/<id>/ | One album: tracklist, song text and player | Everyone |
/blog/ | Articles about the music and the project | Everyone |
/about/ | The purpose of the project | Everyone |
/feedback/ | A form for sending a message | Everyone |
/docs/ | These pages | Anyone curious |
What it's built with
The site is deliberately plain so that it runs on ordinary PHP hosting.
| Part | Choice |
|---|---|
| Server | PHP 8. The blog and admin run on Timber, a small flat-file CMS. There is no build step. |
| Content | JSON and MP3 files on disk: album.json per album, and Timber's data/*.json for blog posts and pages. There is no database. |
| Interface | Alpine.js, Tailwind and hand-written CSS |
| Audio | The browser's built-in audio, driven by b1/player.js |