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Comment by andretti1977 | Hacker News Reader

andretti1977

I love static sites and made some using Hugo. A year later i've started working with WordPress and its ugly/nice (it depends) Gutenberg editor and to be honest, having a look at the quality (yes, there are a lot of excellent plugins and a lot of bad ones) and the availabilty of plugins,i think WordPress is the only platform to go for business oriented websites where seo, caching and other things matters a lot. I've been using wp on production and i'm very happy with it and even if it's far from perfection, even common users learn easily how to use it. Static site generators look like something build for developers instead of non-developers users. What i really miss on WordPress is the capability to produce a static site from a WordPress installation and use netlify for hosting. I know there are some plugins for that purpose but i still haven't tried them.

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I have to back you up here, ultimately I just want to get landing pages and websites done, and Wordpress + Divi gives me that... I’m also now using Wordpress as a static site generator with WP2Static plugin and deploying to Netlify, so now I can get 4x100 for LightHouse. I’ve experimented with Hugo, middleman, Eleventy, Gatsby, Gridsome, Nuxt, Sapper and a bunch of others... but I really just want to hammer out high-performance (page speed and SEO) sites quickly and easily. I hate to say this because I love Gatsby to bits, but ultimately the customer pays for sales instruments from me not my CAAS / JAMStack fetish and tinkering with the latest frameworks. Now I need wordpress forms that integrate with Netlify functions and I’m sorted.

Wordpress definitely is great for some cases, but SSGs absolutely handle SEO, they’re by definition bettyer at caching, they’re immensely more secure, and absolutely capable of building complex sites. At Forestry, we’ve seen a lot of teams have success.

But you’re right, Static site generators have been awesome for developers and less-so for non-developers...Tina is here to change that. The dev experience with Tina is still even better, and it provides the power to make the content editing experience that non-Devs love. Keep an eye out! we’ve been talking to some people and Wordpress support may be in the works soon

A few years ago I did some emergency consulting for a friend whose WordPress site had been hacked. Moving it (to cloud hosted WP) wasn't just "back up the database, restore it" but also copying a dizzying array of files haphazardly strewn across the local filesystem. Performance was atrocious no matter the hardware. Even if the core is (finally?) reasonably secure, installing plugins is like playing Russian roulette. The closer I looked at how it works, the worse the impression I got.

Pick anything else.

WordPress without varnish just does not work...

"I bought this cheap car, ran it for 20 years without any maintenance and suddenly it's falling apart, I blame the car."

Wordpress unless it's very conservatively configured needs a mechanic every so often.

And before the inevitable question is asked "Why use it in the first place, why not just use X", it's because wordpress is the easiest thing to build out while being user friendly to edit and being flexible enough to add extra functionality too.

Sites rarely stay the same, clients always want random 10-20% of business specific functionality tacked on and they don't know what that looks like till potentially years after the site is built. With wordpress you can typically always add that extra functionality on without rebuilding the site in something new, that's why it's so massively popular.

Did you try the Odoo website builder? It is less cluttered than Gutenberg and support inline edition of dynamic content like TinaCMS (e.g. change product price, name, ...):

https://www.odoo.com/page/website-builder

Disclaimer: I am the founder of Odoo

Odoo is huge. I have interacted with some parts of it. Congratulations on building a fine product like this.

So much this. We work with WordPress where our non tech savvy cllients have to build a lot of content using page builders. I wish there was an easy way to auto deploy most of the content as static while keeping the power of CMS capability. We either have very User oriented CMSs including WordPress or developer oriented tools like Gatsby/gridsome etc. Sorry but my B2B client is not going to run a "gatsby build" on every new page or post creation.

The sweet spot worth billions would be WordPress type.CMS that auto deploys static content while keeping dynamic features as needed. Caching plugins are just too cumbersome even though they are an option.

So you should try Publii CMS. It's a good use case for this. Very “client oriented”. It can deploy static sites to Netlify, Github Pages, FTP, and so on.

But does it match WordPress in terms of functionality, plugin ecosystem, ease of deployment etc?

Regarding plugins and functionality, not really. But the deployment is easier — and free. For simple sites, it's a real alternative.

A lot of the problems you’re talking about have been solved for years now. A common setup might be Forestry CMS, Gatsby SSG, and Netlify to build+deploy. And Tina Teams will be the future of that:

https://tinacms.org/teams

But my problem is that my customers cannot run cli. they don't even know what command line is forget running anything on it. So are you saying that Tina teams is built for non tech savvy customers who can use th CMS capability but then everything is auto built/deployed static somewhere AND it also retains any dynamic capabilities that were setup ? Here is a use case:

1. Customer logs in to Tina CMS dashboard as admin (similar to WordPress admin login) 2. Customer creates a landing page with dynamic stuff on it. Say a section with some latest blog posts. Again, this is dynamically pulling in from the database. 3. Customer also creates a "Contact Us" page that has a form that auto emails on submission. 4. Once customer has created these 2 pages above (assuming Tina CMS has nice drag/drop building capability like WordPress page builders), now what happens ?

> But my problem is that my customers cannot run cli

They don't need to. Netlify watches your Github repository and automatically triggers a deploy when changed. They just press save and it gets deployed.

> Tina CMS has nice drag/drop building capability like WordPress page builders

It does! So does Forestry, it's called the Blocks feature.

https://forestry.io/blog/blocks-give-your-editors-the-power-...

https://tinacms.org/docs/fields/blocks

>> The sweet spot worth billions would be WordPress type.CMS that auto deploys static content

that's hardypress, or strattic

I'm using hardypress, no auto deploys, but for content editors, it's a easy button press on the top of the admin area.

>> while keeping dynamic features as needed.

is this list complete enough?

https://www.strattic.com/static-tools/

sidenote: this would be extremely valuable, but as a business, it's very easy to copy. No secret sauce, no network effects, no customer lock-in.

Good to hear some good words about WordPress here at HN. I am working with WordPress based sites since ver 1.5. WP, in trained hands, can do wonders. It can be used as a back-end framework accessible via APIs and can also be used to serve static content.

This. I see that a lot of people just dismiss WordPress without knowing it — or it's ecosystem — enough. Of course that it does have lots of issues, but it's place for certain use cases it very difficult to beat.

I agree. The one problem is that static sites are uniformly faster than even the best configured WordPress installation. I've found that the extra fast loading time can make a difference in conversions.

"WP Super Cache" by the creators of WordPress can make any WordPress website as fast as a static website. When properly configured, it will be nginx serving html files.

You could try Strattic (I'm the CEO) - it's a static site generator for WordPress. It's not a plugin, but rather a platform where we host the WP site and also generate the static output, which we then serve up via CDN. https://www.strattic.com.

There are a few. I've used them instead of upgrading our Wordpress to fix security issues.

We don't use dynamic data, like comments and forms, so the cost of upgrading everything vs just rendering the static site and putting the wordpress instance behind a Basic Authentication is more cost effective.

Another option is to use a static WordPress hosting, like Shifter, Hardy Press or Strattic.

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