Running a site without a DB - XML/XSL? Advice needed.

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Hey all,

I'm creating a new version of my portfolio, and I want to try make it as
simple as possible, preferably without a DB. I'm a designer primariy but have some experience with PHP.

I was thinking I could just put all the info in XML and parse it from that, either using PHP, or maybe even XSL. I've never done anything like this though, so would appreciate people's thoughts how on best to approach it.

My main requirement is that it's easy to maintain. Manually editing XML
is easy enough for me, and also means I could run the site locally
without much hassle.

Here's the requirements I have:
It will look and hevae something like this:
http://cargocollective.com/kevincannon


Home page:

Shows all projects with the title and thumbnail
myportfolio.com

Project page
Shows images & text about projects.
myportfolio.com/project_title/

Tag page
Like the homepage, but showing thumbnails from projects with a
specific tag that I have in the XML
myportfolio.com/tag/tag_name/

About page
Like a project pag, but with different content and no thumbnail
myportfolio.com/about/


Is this feasible? If so how would I go about it? I assume I could get
PHP to parse XML and make a thumbnail list easily enough, but perhaps I
could do that with XSL too as that's what it's for, right?

The other but I have confusion about is how to have a URL structure? I
don't want to have project.php?projectid=3 because that really pisses me
off.

Any thoughts or pointers for me?

Parsing XML with DOMDocument/DOMElement is easy enough. In terms of coding time/maintenance time, I'm convinced that a database would be quicker though. You can use a tool like mysqladmin to directly input to the database, if you don't want to write a web app for that part of the system.

Look at mod_rewrite (an apache module) for SEO friendly urls.