What is stopping someone writing an offline GUI for a static site generator? I think that would help a bit with non-technical adoption.
- local-first CMS with a strong emphasis on folders/files - multiple DVCS integrations (git, mercurial, pijul) with commit signatures (PGP) - support for forge APIs and email-based workflow to simplify the cooperative PR/MR/patch process - strong translations support, to see at a glance missing/outdated translations
There's been some work in this area, but netlify is really complex and is not meant to be selfhosted. And in any case these CMS overlays for SSGs end up making their own conventions that SSGs then have to comply with. It would be interesting to see an alternative approach where a CMS-as-a-library can be adapted to support any kind of SSG.
Some complicated stuff to deal with when building a content editor for SSGs:
- internal and relative links don't have the same semantics across SSGs, and don't point to the same place depending on the webroot - content may contain macros/shortcodes, the local editor needs to be aware of that in order to produce meaningful output - taxonomies and parenthood relationships also vary greatly from one implementation to another
Statamic sort of fits in this discussion. It's a flat file cms that is by default deployed similarly to wp, but it has 2 distinct use cases that separate it a bit.
1. you can use their ssg module to do ssg things and just use their cms as, well, the cms. you can do this locally and just push the output to your favorite web server.
2. if you are familiar with laravel development, you can drop it in an existing laravel application with minimal effort.
On the flip side, we run a custom cms with hugo as the SSG on a much larger site and it builds and deploys in under a minute.
WP has it's uses, but speedy sites are not a focus.