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Comment by vinceguidry | Hacker News Reader

My feeling is that every serious programmer will end up inventing tools like this simply because the overhead of incorporating other people's tools eventually starts to overtake the overhead of maintaining one's own system.

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Let's not forget that Lektor solves actual problems. Show me another CMS that offers:

- Static HTML export with elegant dependency tracking by design (reducing attack vectors and maintenance cost on the frontend server)

- Admin interface (I can't tell a non-techie to connect via SSH, fire up vi and run Jekyll)

- Flexible content structure (Title/Author/Content doesn't really scale beyond a simple blog)

- Elegant design and implementation (I could do anything with WordPress and half a dozen plugins, but I fail to even find a bare-bones theme without kilobytes of code that I will never need; the whole ecosystem revolves around the novice user who understandably prefers "quick and dirty" over touching code)

I have been looking for a CMS that fulfills these exact criteria for quite some time. Lektor looks ideal for projects where the developer prepares a non-trivial page structure (think book listings, music albums, anything that goes beyond bold and italic), but the client should be able to edit content. Thank you, Armin!

Did you test this generator in production? If not, the verdict is not out yet on Lektor and remains to be seen how it will fare in production environments and on the battlefields.

GravCMS perhaps? http://getgrav.org

Grav advertises "smart caching", so it's not static export by design, is it?

You're right, it's not a static site generator, but a (very fast) dynamic flat file CMS. I guess I got this mixed up because I found it while looking into static site generators.

A few alternatives....

http://getgrav.org/

http://getcockpit.com/

http://harpjs.com/

Checkout SpudPress - Static WordPress hosting. All the same except you can use WordPress theming and Admin. If you know how to distinguish between static and dynamic. It's insanely useful

http://spudpress.com

I think a lot of people who would love to use a self-hosted version of this. However, paying for $20/m is usually not worth for a hobby/blog site.

Correct me if I'm wrong but they are either hosted CMS solutions (Grav, Cockpit) or static website generators (Harp) like Jekyll and friends.

Harp actually is a static generator (didn't think it was, never used before).

And yes, Grav and Cockpit are self-hosted flat-file CMS, but now that you ask makes me confused. I was under the impression that Lektor was similar where you have a flat-file CMS and whenever a change is made, the static files are created.

My second guess is that this actually a CMS that exists locally and deploys static files when a change is made?

Lektor is a static site generator: it generates a "compiled" version of the site that is uploaded to a simple web server, without any server-side scripts running. If you want to edit something, you run it locally, make your changes, generate new files and copy those to the web server.

The key addition is that there is a nice UI for adding content in the system running locally, so it can be used by less technical users that might not feel comfortable with writing in text files with special tags/metadata, as traditional static generators require.

I think that's why we have so many static site generators. However programmers typically end up just making the static site generator which is why there was nothing like Lektor before (to the best of my knowledge at least).

I remember that Blogger, in the beginning, used to work as a static site generator. You edited your posts in the user interface, and you could publish the result to a static hosting via FTP.

https://web.archive.org/web/20020210134317/http://www.blogge...

it was shut down in 2010 http://blogger-ftp.blogspot.com/2010/01/deprecating-ftp.html

I know it was shut down. But I think it's interesting to see how the wheel turned, again.

That's the problem with Static Site Generators (SSG) in general. They're opinionated by nature and the learning curve could prove steep to process all the details of the configurations necessary to get the maximum mileage out of the framework but as you dig deeper and deeper, you realize that you'd be better off building your own framework that's fit to your objectives and use cases and improve and expand on that as you go along.

I'm building my own productivity software program using Rails for this reason. I want to see only what I want to see on that page, I want nobody else's ideas getting in the way. It has an intended audience of exactly one, and will in all likelihood never acquire another user.

I disagree. The great thing about SSGs like Jekyll and Middleman is that they're very easy to build plugins for. Jekyll in particular is easy to learn, and easy to expand. I honestly can't imagine a bona fide programmer having that much difficulty picking up Jekyll.

If you did want to build a custom SSG, I think you're best bet is starting from Gulp, and building from there. At least then you can leverage the Gulp ecosystem instead of re-building everything yourself.

Yep.

I dare say it's how many currently-popular products came into being.

http://urubu.jandecaluwe.com/

:-)

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