Publii – open source static CMS for everyone | Hacker News Reader

Publii – open source static CMS for everyone

github.com

98 pointsBobMitro43 comments

I guess the submission should have been the website, which is more targeted towards users, not contributors.

I spent a few minutes looking for a simple way to install this without all the node/python stuff on the GitHub page, turns out it is only shown on their website: https://getpublii.com/download/

I guess someone heard you!

https://github.com/GetPublii/Publii/commit/4758af15f7032b96f...

I tried this out when it was first released but made a note to come back when the source was published. So I'll be looking forward to digging into it again. Publii solves the biggest downside of static site generators, that they're not really friendly for most end users. I am still a little leery of how it will handle a collaborative work environment (with a Dropbox or similar backend), but that isn't different than any other static site generator. I also previously made a note that the templating system was messy, so I'm curious if that has improved!

If looking at alternatives, a close project is Lektor -- static web generator with a web interface and easy cloud sync for non-CLI contributors.

https://www.getlektor.com

This was a turn-off: https://www.getlektor.com/blog/2018/1/lektor-31-released/#su...

It looks a bit complicated for my mother to use, with cli knowledge required even for a basic edit. What i've been looking for since a while is a software that lets me start the project, publish it to github pages, and then generate an executable that i send to my client. The executable would have the user rights embeded in it, and the credentials to push to github would be in it too. My client would just start it, be greeted by a UI, change stuffs and click "save", that would push to github pages. For anything more complex, they'd have to ask me, and i'd do it from my machine with full user rights. The soft would do a git pull at startup, to have an up to date project, and git push at save time. I'm curious of anything fitting that scenario, ideally open source.

Download Windows or MacOS Installer (https://getpublii.com/) and install it on your mother's computer. No tech knowledge is required to manage a website with Publi.

> Publii is a desktop-based CMS for Windows and Mac that makes creating static websites fast and hassle-free, even for beginners.

;)

Love the idea of a full editor. I use Thingamablog and it is ancient and very unwieldy. Any other recommendations for a Linux user?

Hugo with NetlifyCMS perhaps? Or Grav?

So not really for everyone.

The idea was to make a static generator for devs and beginners without any tech knowledge. The Linux version will released with the first stable app version.

And License not for everyone :-))

I personally use Hugo with Forestry. It's not perfect but it does the job. I'm waiting on the next major version of NetlifyCMS which should handle multi-lingual websites.

Publii and others like Blocsapp interest me a lot.

I know we are back to square one, dreamweaver style. But having a universal super custom web app makes it hard for the business and marketing people to use. And wordpress has a large attack vector..

If you're willing to satisfy with a static site, static versions of WordPress(like HardyPress) solve the security issue well.

They still create a problem with dynamic features, but you can implement dynamic features by using third-party services, and get most of the features needed for most small sites that way.

Love it. Reminds me of building sites with iWeb and RapidWeaver back in the early 2000s. They were a great way to get started building sites without having to muck about with databases and whatnot.

It sees to me though I’m happy to be proven wrong, there’s a real gap in the market for a powerful but not too technical website-building framework.

For me, Drupal 7 hit the sweet-spot between power and ease of development. I built some advanced sites without being a coder. However with D8 they went for the enterprise and it’s almost impossible to get the thing set up without being a serious developer.

Wordpress is hack-prone unless you know what you’re doing and anything beyond its basic blog features requires development or annual plugin subscriptions.

I love static site generators, but they do take a developer to set up and the -technical user experience is still a bodge, despite the best efforts of NetlifyCMS, Forestry, Cloudcannon etc.

CraftCMS looks nice, but features like user roles or ecommerce requires the pricey paid version.

Is there anything I’ve missed? What would you recommend?

Nice though platforms like Squarespace are, it’d be sad if the simple-but-powerful open source/self-hosted space was completely conceded to paid services.

The "Opt out of tracking" link in your privacy policy [1] goes to a 404 page [2] at the moment.

[1] https://getpublii.com/privacy-policy/

[2] https://getpublii.com/privacy-policy/opt-out%20of%20tracking

This will be nice if it integrate with popular static site generator, like hugo, jekyll and/or gatsby.js. It is useful for developer to quickly build the site in Markdown, and give this frontend to business people to add post or whatever custom content they want.

I've played Publii and it's awesome. It works offline. However, it won't start unless I'm online (v.0.23.3).

Clicking the settings or about menu tends to get me lost for a few seconds. Soln: A back button, Escape, Backspace, Close button maybe?

- python (>= 2.5.0 && < 3.0.0)

That's... that's a really weird build requirement.

Doesn't seem that odd to me. It's not Python 3, but requires a not-ancient version of Python 2.

Most of the times it's python 2.7+ or 3.3+.

Clean, simple UI. I may steal a couple ideas for Jekyll+ [1].

1: https://github.com/Wiredcraft/jekyllplus

Deleted, was [wrong stuff]

Tomte, you can download the installer for Windows or macOs from the app homepage: https://getpublii.com/

Those are development instructions, they have a full installer on the homepage...

It looks very interesting but how hard is it to just create your own static site generator really? Just need to use mustache.js for templating and write a few html pages ...

Been a drupal and wordpress user for years I have a problem with the static site generator or static site itself calling themselves CMSes.

If you can not classify the content per user, i.e. certain users can only access certain content, by login, you're not really a CMS, just call that a static html site.

CMS was designed to be very different from static html sites, normally it has database, login, dynamically generated content under full ACL management, as what Drupal, Joomla do.

stop calling static website CMS please,you can not even support multi-user login.

It’s a system. That manages your content. What would you prefer we call it?

The term “manage” should imply more than CRUD.

See https://www.enterpriseready.io and check out some MVP content “management” options in e.g. TextPattern.

Notice the user roles:

https://blog.arvixe.com/textpattern-admin-tab-a-primer/

So we have different definitions of CMS. To me, it’s just a system that allows CRUD ops on content by non-technical personnel. It often does other things too, like access/role management and editorial workflow, but I personally don’t see these as core to the definition.

Can we maybe agree to call this a “static CMS”? Just saying it’s “not a CMS” feels like we’re taking away a useful way of talking about tools like this — in exchange for some vague sense of semantic purity.

Not semantic purity. Business need. Once your company is big enough to have some people who tell other people what to do and sign off on it, you have management, and the M in CMS is about being able to mirror that management.

I think you’re describing not a CMS, but a web UI for content authoring for a static site generator. That product category is described by Prose.io, a web UI for Git-backed static site generators:

“Prose provides a beautifully simple content authoring environment for CMS-free websites.”

http://prose.io/#about

Notice the phrase “CMS-free”, as in, if you just want to author and edit content, you don’t need a content management system.

Forestry understands this distinction, the first paragraph on their “Managing Content” docs talks about Roles. If you jump to pricing, and follow across, you see identity and access “Management” is the feature that grows with price.

https://forestry.io/#/

https://forestry.io/docs/editing/

https://forestry.io/pricing/

// Footnote: My interpretation is based on having built a commercial private label web-based CMS in late 90’s, predating Red Dot’s web based live editing released in 2001, and following static site gen ever since. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenText#Content_authoring

There is no standards body who formally define and enforce terms like "CMS" or "WCMS". It's probably not worth battling over such terms, other than in a speculative sense.

I've spec'd out potential CMS features, and there are a lot of features that various orgs may or may not need for their Internet sites and/or intranets. I don't see any solid line(s) between CMS and "CRUD": it's often a fuzzy boundary. CRUD tends to be for a specific domain need, whereas a CMS is intended to be more general purpose: for different departments or groups in a org. What's a show-stopper in terms of missing features for a given org depends on the org.

Slapping CKeditor on top of a database or dynamic file/folder creation system can get you a quick-and-dirty self-rolled CMS. You can add groupings and org hierarchies as needed using typical relational modelling. But in the longer run, one tends to end up reinventing wheels already found in formal CMS's, I find.

> CMS was designed to be...

On the contrary, the first CMSes were static site generators. You are correct that role-based functions came quickly, but the competition back in the late 90s was with Frontpage and Dreamweaver. Wordpress didn't exist yet. Most of the competition was around how easy it was to use your editors, how productive a non-tech author could be, and how much you could speed content through an approval cycle to get the signoffs in large companies on their public messaging. But the end result, at least pre-2000, was static content.

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