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Comment by sgallant | Hacker News Reader

Co-creator here. I was building a website for someone last summer and I REALLY didn't want to use WordPress, so my friend and I built forestry.io.

Some highlights:

• Supports all Jekyll plugins

• Integrates with GitHub & Bitbucket (commits back to your repo)

• Zero configuration for you project

• Hosting not provided (deploy to S3, Github Pages, FTP)

• Use Markdown or WYSIWYG

I'd love to know what you think if the concept. Get in touch at scott@forestry.io if you have any specific needs.

Thanks!

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I agree that the project not being open-source is a great no-go.

You guys should consider replicating the Wordpress model: open-source tools and paid plans for hosting & support.

Don't think that S3 or github pages are too simple for a user to being autonomous in deployment. IMHO typical use case for your product is a tech guyssetting things up for some non tech people to administrate and write content afterwards.

This means the keys are : - 0 tech steps in administration (no git push, no jekyll generate etc.) - plugins - plugins - plugins - themes - plugins

But clearly if this can become an alternative to WP, this is great because devs hate WP and it scales really bad, while static websites is the complete opposite.

I totally agree, although i would pay money for this code. Not being able to modify it makes it unusable in a custom jekyll setup.

> I'd love to know what you think if the concept

Having an interface to edit the blog content is great for us devs who would like to involve non-technical people in the copywriting.

However, I'm wondering about the fit of your solution to your target audience: jekyll users are developers, and use an open source solution they can control and customize.

Why would they want to add a closed-source hosted piece on top of it? Personally it's a no-go for me.

Hey -- this seems really cool, especially for one Jekyll site I manage but want a nontechnical person to be able to update. I found a bug(?) though -- I linked it to a site deployed on S3 and published a test post, and it pushed all the newly built files to s3, but didn't set them to the public-read ACL, so I got AccessDenied errors on refresh until I logged into s3 and manually set them public myself.

Edit: Another piece of feedback -- it's really awesome that it picks up on my custom frontmatter when editing posts, but when I create a new post, none of the custom frontmatter fields are there. Can I enter the frontmatter in the WYSIWYG or is there some other way to add it?

Hey, Co-creator here. In regards to the first issue, we assume that you have applied Amazon's recommended bucket policy as per https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/WebsiteAcces.... We do this in case the website being deployed isn't meant to be publicly available.

Re custom frontmatter, with Jekyll we respect the defaults that are set in your config (https://jekyllrb.com/docs/configuration/#front-matter-defaul...). If a post matches a type or path that is specified in a default, we make those fields available in the post. We have come to realize that this feature of Jekyll isn't used as often as it should be (it's really useful) and are working on giving users the ability to add fields to their posts.

Ah got it, that all makes sense. Thanks for the response! :)

Cool site. May I ask is your WYSIWYG custom made?

We're using Redactor.

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