Show HN: Primo – all-in-one IDE, CMS, component library, static site generator
primo.af
primo.af
I’d written off freelance web development a couple years ago after yet another spontaneously-combusting WordPress project, but primo’s enabled me to get back into it and it’s been A+ so far. primo kind of looks like a page builder, but it’s totally the opposite - instead of abstracting away the code it makes it more accessible.
It’s free forever, and I’ll be open-sourcing it soon (built in Svelte - beautiful framework). Ideas & critiques super appreciated.
Cheers
One of my teams implemented everything thinking these were rough edges that would eventually be ironed out, but realized too late that WP is making terrible decisions and is stuck in a 2005~ mindset. Github issues are filled with the poor souls tasked with enterprise implementations meeting Automattic's (presumably overwhelmed) indifference.
It's frustrating because to my knowledge there aren't any enterprise grade WYSIWYG CMSes that let you freeform edit/rearrange React in-place – this is or was the closest as far as UX is concerned.
overscroll-behavior-x: none;What's the idea behind calling it Primo?
In trade for not doing the hosting, it becomes just a native app you can own, rather than a subscription service. Just need a commodity web host to slap it up on.
I suggest NearlyFreeSpeech. It has an outdated UI and it's very DIY, but the pricing is very good. They have an option for static sites, with a lower price.
Or Oracle free VM. (I made a comparison of some free stuff in the beginning of this article: https://matrix.org/docs/guides/free-small-matrix-server )
I'm also falling back into the world of building static marketing sites and I can't say that I found tools that I'm happy with.
As a general suggestion, if the intended users for your system are also not technical people, I would suggest to give some templates or a library of pre-made components, so that non tech savvy people can build their website with your tool. You could even sell premium components :-)
Thank you for sharing!
Easy enough for non tech people to change small thinks (like text).
But lets you get "down to business" for all the more complex changes.
I mean it's 2020 toady even kids learn how to code and most companies hire some tech savy people anyway to do the general work in setting up a CMS even if they use one which "should" not need it.
When you say "CMS", do you have (or look to have) CMSey features such as language translation support and approval workflows?
> Repositories > Public and private
> This application will be able to read and write all public and private repository data.
Would it be possible to use deploy keys for specific repositories instead?
Too bad, looks like a really good product.
"Prime" is the analagous English word, I would think, and it is not a superlative. One would not say "that's prime" of something good, impressive, whatever.
"Prime" means: ready; in the thing's initial state; available for immediate use.
It also has a meaning in maths, but that's not really relevant.
https://www.namecheap.com/domains/registration/results/?doma...
- How optimal/minified is the generated code?
- FYI, if you have third party cookies blocked, logging in with GitHub will fail (the login popup opens then immediately closes with no error indication). While failure might be expected, it would be nice to give the user a hint on what might have gone wrong.
- It's pretty optimal. It's not minifying the HTML so you can see the tree in Github and see changes. But PurgeCSS gets run on the bundle before it builds out, so your css should be as small as possible.
- Hadn't considered that, thanks!
That's great to hear. I've used some generators that generate bloated junk (especially if they're WYSIWYG-ish). I'm terrible at messaging, but something along the lines of mentioning that (1) it let's you decide what you use (i.e. it doesn't force you to use/generate JavaScript), and (2) it avoids bloat and only includes what you use.
Through maybe it's focused a bit more then some other systems on (also) supporting a bit more tech savy people. But then in my experience even with CMS targeted a less tech savy people once a change needs to be done which is more then just changing the text it's always passed to the tech savy people anyway.
Through I guess given how primo highlights the IDE, Components Library & Static Site Generator not all web focused CMS do that today??
https://pinegrow.com/tailwind-visual-editor/
Here's a video of what we were working on, if anyone's curious:
I swear the zeitgeist/collective unconscious is real.
Now that you introduced me to grapesjs there's gotta be a new iteration on my part, thanks!
[1]: https://mertjf.github.io/tailblocks/ [2]: https://stitches.hyperyolo.com/
Can you explain a bit more about the non-tech user experience for content editors?
Would love to find a magic Wordpress replacement with a proper git & tailwind supported workflow for devs and a simple interface for content editors. I’m hoping this fits the bill.
So there's a simplified toolbar (no dev stuff) but they can still add page sections and components from the component library. And when they edit components they only see the fields. You'll be able to control which stuff they have access to in the future.
Note sure whether that is similar to what you are looking for, but I've been working on a CMS that commits a JSON file to Git. It is called FrontAid CMS and currently in public beta: https://frontaid.io/
It works like this: Create a data model and put it in your Git repo. FrontAid will pick it up and generate input fields accordingly. The content editors can then create/update the input fields and the resulting content is then stored in a JSON file in your own Git repository. The big advantage of that is that your content lives where your actual code is.
* Professional developers don't want to spend their days on a online GUI like this as opposed to the comfort of a repository and trusty code editor and tools.
* End users, even with a great WYSIWYG UI, may still not be able to make knowledgeable design decisions. Also, even with the best WYSIWYG GUI, sometimes you just need to tweak the source.
We should be building better structured content management systems as opposed to better Dreamweaver-like tools. Structured content also enables other cool things like single-source, multiple-output publishing.
There are a lot of these "headless CMS"s nowadays but I still haven't found one that I really like, I think there's room for improvement.
We've used Contentful extensively basically since it's inception, and have toyed around with Dato enough to know what the offering is. We have our own list of missing pieces for both but am always curious about other's experiences.
primo enables end users by enabling developers by offering immediate access to those same productive tools and making the code as accessible as possible.
As to your comment on single-source-multi-output, primo will be able to expose all the content on your site at an endpoint soon, stay tuned.
Uncaught (in promise) TypeError: e is undefined Ng _User.svelte:34
Since this needs a lot of code to actually create a site, why not create a CMS instead that can be connected through an API to a SSG?
I'm not sure I understand your second question, but I believe lots of those already exist, and it made more sense for my use-case to just build the site directly from primo.
Or am I missing the feature (I did try and look)?
I must admit, I assumed a dark pattern was at play.
To each their own. It’s a cool project.
I’ve spent a lot of time contributing to OSS, created popular OSS projects, and I felt pretty shitty when I realized other companies were using the software to make money and I hadn’t done anything to ensure I was compensated.
There are dozens of amazing open source projects posted on HN every week, and on average, the ones out of these that are outstanding and could be turned into a business model are countless every month.
So I don't understand what makes this project stand out so much that it's like leaving money on the table. (this is the first time I'm seeing a comment where the money is apparently on the table because the project is so good).
Good software product/service is a tiny aspect of doing business and turning a profit. The money doesn't appear magically on the table!
This type of approach lets a technical person work with the marketing team so that the site can be both easy to update and optimized for business needs.
You’re right that good software/service does not automatically mean profit, but you’re missing the understanding that if you serve a hungry demographic, you only need a MVP to bring in revenue.
I just don’t see it. Ghost already tried and gave up. There’s tons of Wordpress competitors out there. I could be wrong but where’s the data?
Part of the problem is the drain of the plugins they load up, but invariably Wordpress would be far less useful to them without those plugins, so they just end up wrestling with it all the time wishing there was an alternative.
1. git service providers 2. SSGs 3. CMSs 4. Static site hosting providers
If one is targeting end users who just want to write, it's quite hard to beat WordPress since the experience is completely streamlined.
I've told the story before, but we did a CMS very similar to this back in 1999/2000, and was able to charge 5-6 figures to Fortune 500 companies for a license. But that market crashed. CMS is just a specific flavor of CRUD apps, and most web devs can make one, so they just don't have the same price point as they used to.
That doesn't invalidate the work put into this CMS. I like what I can see of it. It looks like a good piece of work. But most CMS successes these days do give away the core tool for free, then make money on plugins, hosting, and services.
I realise it may be needed for some primo features, but is there any chance we can use email to auth with primo's Discourse?
I'll be building test sites and deploying to SAFE Network as soon as I can. Svelte is my favourite so again I'm please that you've chosen to use it to build primo. Good luck.
Is it really needed?
AF: as fuck
I’ve created my own blog around a pure pre-render solution (using gatsby stripped down to just pre-rendering) - because I want to control everything and not be dependent on anything aside from the stack (react in my case).
Impressive how you’ve tied everything in to github. I’ll be reading your code to see how it all works.
Congrats!
Would love to see the code. If you're planning to open source it, there's no downside to making the repo public now. We know it will get better :)
primo.press shows about/features/login/signup/pricing/cookie policy
This looks really cool!
In light of the recent outages on Github it will be anything but blazingly fast.
However, of late, I've taken to hand-writing HTML and CSS for some small static sites I manage. I still use Hugo and Sass for my personal site, though.
I would expect a static site generator (or at least any one I would choose to use) to create pages that do not require javascript.
Edit: My bad. Still, for a landing page for something like this, wouldn't you want to eat your own dogfood?
This is a static-site creation app so makes sence that it would require javascript even if the resulting page does not.
Are there any pages created with this thing I can look at?
Here it is: https://primocafe.vercel.app/ And here's the repo: https://github.com/mateomorris/primocafe