Hacker News Reader

The backend is irrelevant to the interface the author uses.

But if the author needs to add content, they need to use the generator, if they're using an interface, they're no longer on a static site.

No, they're in an admin application, which has no reason to be the same "thing" as the site you're authoring.

This is what I'm talking about, people are so engrained in the way things currently work that can't see obvious things like this. It's code, you can do whatever you want.

We're working on an open-source CMS for static site generators at netlify. It's still in beta, but we just opened up the repo here:

https://github.com/netlify/netlify-cms

Since netlify can already run the build of a static site whenever there's a push to git, all the CMS needs to do is manage the content in the Git repository in a user friendly way.

There's absolutely no reason non-technical users shouldn't be able to content just because the end result is not using a database...

I think making a desktop application using electron as the basis, and embedding one of the SSGs would be interesting. Are you aware of anything like that?

Closest thing I can think of is Microsoft's WebMatrix.

The interface could simply re-generate the static files on save. Movable Type works like this by default.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com