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Comment by vorpalhex | Hacker News Reader

There's a ton of these little php CMSs but it feels like inheritating the entire attack surface of LAMP or even just an apache + php stack is insane these days.

Use a static site generator. Maybe have a nice UI around it. Publish the whole thing to S3 or whatever CDN fronted storage solution you like. Almost no attack surface, mindlessly easy, very cheap.

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> Use a static site generator.

Regardless of how you serve the end-user site (generated ahead-of-time or at request time), there's enormous value in backing it with a database and providing non-technical maintainers a friendly UI over that database for managing their own content. If you want something more minimal than the OP, you might go look up something called "Headless CMS".

There's nothing saying you couldn't provide a friendly UI on top of a static site generator. The first big hit CMS for publishing blogs, Movable Type (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movable_Type), worked exactly that way -- it used MySQL as its content store and provided a nice WYSIWYG interface for working with content, but when you hit "Publish" it ground out your site as a set of static HTML files.

The parent comment seemed to be suggesting that people use a static site generator "instead of a CMS". Part of what I was trying to do with my comment is point out the orthogonality of the two. A static site generator is just a glorified cache over a normal web server.

Forestry.io is a headless CMS that is backed by Git. It is made for Static Site generators and the content is still kept in your repository.

This looks really cool though it seems awfully close to editing Markdown and pushing to Git directly. I suppose the value it adds is abstracting away Git operations for non-technical content editors?

Forestry does a lot more than just abstract away the Git operations. It has a very advanced front matter template system that makes it possible to build very complex content models while providing a nice and simple UI for managing content, menus and media. It’s really quite impressive.

We’ve built a few sites on Forestry + Hugo and are very happy with the combination. https://www.jetflite.fi is a good example of a site having a rather complex content model.

Yup, pretty much. I’ve not worked extensively with Forestry, but I have with Netlify CMS, which is an alternative with a very similar premise. My experience was that it’s very difficult to build a robust CMS on top of markdown. If basic content editing is what you need, great! If, however, you need to accommodate a variety of conditions, things get dicey fast. The issue is that it’s exceedingly difficult to program or direct a CMS how to reason about even the most rudimentary primitive values or types in something as simple as markdown. After all, things are either there or they’re not. This can quickly causes your view layer to swell into an unmanageable mess.

Overall, I’d use it for personal projects if I were feeling fancy (I rarely do) or client projects with very simple requirements.

Is it just me, or does every page on forestry.io take 4400+ milliseconds to load? I can't even use the website because it's so bad.

It isn't just you, I tried and see my self staring at their blank pages for a few seconds and then everything appears at once.

> providing non-technical maintainers a friendly UI over that database for managing their own content

how is git based Content management adequate for non-technical (read "WTF is GIT?") users ? That's why i still deliver throughout WordPress

"backed by git" doesn't mean the user has to interact with git at all. The user makes a change in the interface, the CMS creates a commit and pushes to the repo.

I'd love to see a CMS that runs on your local PC to drive a well-known static generator (Hugo, jekyll etc). This seems like the best of both worlds; no attack surface and easy to use.

https://getpublii.com/

There are others as well.

I've had good experience with Lektor for simple web sites.

https://getlektor.com/

TinaCMS supports this exact thing with Gatsby and Next.js

There's also been some prototypes of TinaCMS being used to edit Hugo sites.

https://tinacms.org

Just configure your headless CMS to make changes to your local git repo. NetlifyCMS can do this, I am sure the other ones can do too.

I was just thinking that static site generators would deserve their own awesome list, and there we go. Someone already made one.

https://github.com/myles/awesome-static-generators

https://staticsitegenerators.net/ includes a comprehensive list and has been around for a while.

Even better, and sortable. Thanks!

Those "awesome" lists don't make sense to me because they just end up being a crowdsourced list of every piece of software in <category> with no moderation for quality.

Yeah, I’d like to see at least some kind of ranking and an idea how big/active the ecosystem around a project is.

Kinda agree. I use Airtable as the CMS for my personal website, and it's actually pretty quick to whip up pages with Gatsby (or whatever floats your boat in terms of SSG), then throw it onto some hosting and tada!

I even made some webhooks so I can trigger rebuilds from within Airtable, so when I change stuff I don't need to worry about going to the host and manually clicking rebuild.

> Maybe have a nice UI around it.

I only know about Lektor and MovableType. Arte there more SSGs with some kind of web interface to write and edit posts?

Use Stackbit to create your combo of SSG, Theme and CMS. https://www.stackbit.com/

Stackbit really is a great product! I was able to throw up a marketing site for my family's rental property in a few hours for some non-technical people to manage.

Forestry.io is a nice wrapper around a bunch of SSGs, backed by git. It's a paid subscription, but with a pretty generous free tier. I'm using it so my less-technical co-founders can edit our Jekyll-based support site.

Jekyll has jekyll-admin: https://github.com/jekyll/jekyll-admin

Forestry.io supports an entire mess of site generators including Hugo and Jekyll. You can also leverage Github or Gitlab's ui directly to edit or create files.

publii has a very well polished GUI https://getpublii.com/

How do you solve the "search engine" problem with a static web site ? I never found a solution for that issue. I want to search in my blog, full text with no external service.

If the site is small enough, you could use something like this: https://github.com/weixsong/elasticlunr.js

Basically compile the text content of all your files into a JSON file, and search over that in JS. If the site is not small enough for this approach, go with an external search provider or don't make it a static site.

You can also use something like NextJS's static pages, where you can still use React for client-side interactivity that doesn't require dynamic server communication.

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