yep, i completely agree. The only reason it's JS heavy is because it's a MVP. If this project turns out well it will end up being a simple HTML with bare-minimum javascript.
At first I agreed with many of the other posters, that this just had more overhead than it needed, so I didn't take it seriously.
But when I saw this comment, I got it.
It's an MVP! You launched it before it was ready, but not before you were ready. Which is exactly what we're supposed to do. Grow a thick skin, share it, and take your lumps. This way, your baby will grow up much faster than it would have it you went it alone.
Many of us here, including myself, are too chicken to do that as early as we should. Thank you for showing the way.
Respect.
I don't think it is because the platform is "heavy" (I assume in productive features) but rather it is what you are probably most recently familiar with.
For example I have built similar CMS tools for internal documentation with Java + Postgres (markdown and mustache.java) in less than a day. The development time was quick because I know Java and SQL... and basic HTML + request response handling.
The fact is it is even easier to pump this stuff out if you don't do Javascript heavy stuff because you can use so many different languages for basic HTTP + HTML + storage. Hell you might even be able to have a RDBMS (like postgres) with a couple plugins itself power the whole thing.
A Minimum Viable Product could be done in a few minutes with pandoc, a popular and standard tool that supports markdown to html conversation out of the box.
Add a few CSS styles and here you go! Awesome looking static pages, with 0 javascript whatsoever, based on proven battle-tested software ;)
apt-get install pandoc
# convert from markdown to html
pandoc -f markdown -t html article.md
I've learned a great deal reading these comments, so thank you for posting your project.