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Comment by ohitsdom | Hacker News Reader

I'm still looking for a static site generator that's as easy to use as Wordpress (so with a UI, not markdown). Anyone know of something that fits the bill?

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I was looking for the same thing, so I built it. It's a WordPress plugin that outputs a static copy of your site to a ZIP or a directory of your choice. The thought being that you put WordPress on a subdomain (e.g. wp.example.com) and have the main site (www.example.com) served by the static copy.

https://wordpress.org/plugins/simply-static/

It's still a work in progress (it launched a little over a month ago) but the feedback so far has been positive.

I did something very much like this for a while. I'd use WordPress to create content on my laptop, then I'd crawl my own site using wget to collect the results and push those up to the real website. Turns out there are a few gotchas that simply-static didn't address, but I wrote a blog post about my experiences here.

http://pl.atyp.us/wordpress/index.php/2013/04/using-wordpres...

The older posts on my site were all converted this way, though the newer ones are done directly in Pelican.

Crawling your own site to output a static site seems so simple it is genius. Set up a cron job every X minutes. Just... so... simple. I will do this!

When Healthcare.gov was first built, before the "enroll in insurance" feature launched and failed, it was a static site managed by a Github-based editor called Prose.io.

https://developmentseed.org/blog/new-healthcare-gov-is-open-...

https://developmentseed.org/blog/2012/june/25/prose-a-conten...

I have not used prose.io, but the company that built it, Development Seed, is strong. You might have heard of one of their other projects: Mapbox.

I have no idea if prose.io is being currently maintained. Development Seed was in the middle of transitioning to doing Mapbox full time, and Healthcare.gov was their "one last" consulting project. By all accounts their work on the static part of the site was great, but was totally overshadowed by the failure of the enrollment feature.

You might want to look into CloudCannon (http://cloudcannon.com/). It's still an early product, but the idea is pretty cool. You auth CloudCannon to your Jekyll GitHub project and it exposes a Web GUI that allows content editors to do CRUD operations. CloudCannon then commits those changes directly to the repo. Then a GitHub webhook with something like Travis CI can build the site and deploy the changes.

This is great because it allows engineers to maintain a simple static website and content editors can use a web based GUI that is kind of like WordPress (though CloudCannon has a long way to go on the usability of its web GUI). We used CloudCannon at Hillary for America for a small project. It ended up not being the right tool for the job, but I definitely think there is a use case for CloudCannon and the team behind it is super open to feedback and iteration.

If you're looking for a static site generator that's as easy to use as Wordpress, you could consider using Wordpress. Wordpress caching plugins can generate static HTML which then gets served to visitors directly by Apache or Nginx, without hitting PHP at all.

What I'm looking for is a plugin that can make a entire Wordpress site static to freeze sites in time so they don't require Wordpress, PHP or MySQL.

Another workflow could be to use WordPress locally in a VM to edit, then generate a static site you upload through git or whatever to a bare minimum server.

Any plugin that fit the bill? I remember searching but never found something perfect.

...and this is why we're not moving to SSGs even though this almost exact article gets posted monthly here.

Its trivial to put in a cache level that generates and stores static html in from of WP, Drupal, etc. So you get both worlds; the tools that dynamic CMS's give you and the performance of a static site.

I think it took me 5 minutes to install varnish on a WP server I have. Varnish delivers these pages straight from ram. My page load performance is fairly absurd. If that's too technically daunting or your webhost doesn't support varnish, totalcache is also good. Boost for Drupal is good too.

It's far from optimal for deployment, though, as you still occasionally depend on that WP site, and then have the hassle of handling availability etc.

I wish more CMSs would support exporting all changes directly, so that you could e.g. rsync the sites out to edge servers or a CDN and be able to use it for full failover too without suddenly having stuff expire from the caches at the most inconvenient times.

Movable Type used to be able to export everything to flat files, for example (though, I guess more out of necessity back in a world where not everyone would have a host that could/would provide PHP).

I just started redoing my blog to iterate over all the pages and wrapping my Sinatra app to fake requests to generate a full static copy that way. Lets me optionally serve it up dynamically when writing, and then generate a static copy. It's just a few hours dirty hack for now, but I'll be doing this more often - it's so nice to have most of the content completely stateless.

I believe WordPress is bundled with a plugin that does that, right?

I think the main problem is that it requires an extra step when you're running Apache (modifying .htaccess) to become truly static.

We're very close to launching a product that serves this exact purpose. [1]

Our primary motivation was being able to build a static website as easy as using WordPress - so we figured, why not turn WordPress into a static site generator?

As notacoward mentioned, there is a few gotchas so we decided to launch it as a SaaS in order to abstract those things away and make it fully hosted on a CDN out of the box. We still give you full access to the WP install though, so no vendor-lock in or shackles for the customer.

Happy to give anyone a demo if you're interested. You can contact me at mathias AT dotsqua.re

[1] http://spudpress.com

I was toying with the idea of building an electron based UI frontend for Jekyll, where you'd start it up and point it at a jekyll project dir. It would essentially work like a stripped down cms admin running locally, and update your jekyll project files. Does something like this exist?

Dreamweaver ;P

Last I used MovableType (a few years ago), it seemed to fit the bill.

edit: apparently it's mentioned in the TFA

I wrote a maven plugin to put all the markdown files together. I use iA Writer as the UI.

Bricolage, in theory, but I never got it running.

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