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Comment by tvanantwerp | Hacker News Reader

I've been looking hard for an open source replacement for the backend that would let my users edit as simply as with WordPress, but not tie my hands with PHP and an odd API for creating the front end. But so far, I haven't found anything that meets users needs like WordPress does. I wish there were more competition in this space. The closest I've seen--different services that let you create content and provide a GraphQL API--are all SaaS and not very cheap. Maybe the financial incentives to create a viable WordPress competitor that's open source just aren't there anymore...

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Hi, check out Ghost.

https://ghost.org/

- It's a blog engine with support for static pages.

- It's open source (NodeJS)

- It's self-hostable.

- It's beautiful out of the box.

- It's entirely customizable.

- It's markdown-powered with a great WYSIWYG editor.

- There's no data lock in; excellent import/export support.

I could go on. Just give it a shot. "Ghost Pro" (https://ghost.org/pricing/) from the official team is a bit pricy if you're saying you want something cheap, but Digital Ocean has a two-click-setup droplet for a self-hosted version (seriously, I tried it, it's ridiculously simple). Referral link with $100 DO credit if you are interested: https://m.do.co/c/ea4165209ae0

Some examples of small customizations of the default "Casper" theme:

https://articles.hsreplay.net/

https://spreadprivacy.com/

https://blog.mozvr.com/

More of their customers: https://ghost.org/customers/

When you say "not very cheap", you're illustrating the problem: people don't want to spend money in their CMS.

Companies spend hundreds (or more) a month on various SaaS services but are looking for dirt cheap for something as critical as their public facing website.

I don't think that's it, though. I think the issue is moreso that they have to pay for the CMS and then, typically, for someone to customize it for them to make it what they want it to be. You're essentially paying a very high price for the development and paying another cost on top of that for just the platform might seem excessive to those who don't really know how it all works. People don't mind spending money on a CMS as long as they know how it fits into the project. The issue is that most developers just pick a CMS and don't pay for it because they want to keep more of the money from the client rather than because they know what they're doing and it's the best choice for the project.

If you want it cheap, you self-host it, don't you..?

There are a lot of companies with a proprietary CMS in the general publishing space (TownNews, GTXcel are both popular), but you can bet that their customers and prospects are always considering a switch to WordPress for various reasons. Financial, extensibility, the fact that most people just know how to use it, not being tied into a 3 year contract, feature list, great reputation, existing users, etc.

It's not easy doing what WordPress did. Other major CMSs like Drupal and Joomla came and mostly went because maintaining the level of product quality and community is harder than it looks.

Check out WriteFreely: https://writefreely.org/

It's written in Go, is federated (ActivityPub), and is easy to set up and run.

There are loads of content management systems that follow the same model.

My favourite is Umbraco, which to date is still my favourite editing experience. If you can stomach .NET, it's probably the best choice for an open-source CMS available right now.

Check this: https://appdrag.com It's a cloud CMS and backend It's also crazy fast and serverless.

Have you looked at wagtail.io ?

I use Wagtail CMS for my sites. It’s the best CMS I have found so far. It’s built on Django. Instead of looking for plugins you just integrate with other services with Python libraries or standard REST calls.

It has something similar to Gutenburg’s block based content editor called Streamfield. Which makes it easier to theme rich content compared to rich text editors. Craft CMS has something similar.

One thing that is missing in Django though is asset digests you find in Rails - anytime an asset like an image updates it should give it a new name so it’s not served by the cache.

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