Publii – CMS with SSG | Hacker News Reader

Publii – CMS with SSG

getpublii.com

74 pointssmusamashah38 comments

My mom publishes a tiny site via WordPress. Some of the plugins and themes she relies upon are no longer maintained. I was researching Publii yesterday, wondering if it could be a better alternative. She already exports a static version of the WordPress site using a Simply Static plugin. Publii also has a WordPress import feature. Those two facts combined with that seems to be a friendly UI makes it worth trying out.

You can take a look at https://motif.land too

I took a look and I was not impressed. Assuming that the home page was built with Motif, the font was far too small. Even after increasing the size 3 times the font was still too small for my preference. There is no information on the home page about cost, and "requesting access" requires that you provide 10 pieces of information. I may be wrong, but my thought when I saw that was that this is an information harvesting site.

I run a few WordPress sites, two very small, one pretty large, and I've got to say WordPress and the maturity there is truly incredible. I used the Simply Static plugin on one of the sites and it is great. The other sites are way too dynamic however. I can't even use much caching because of that, so performance is a constant battle.

The big site is getting ported to Elixir/Phoenix in the next year or so, but it will be tough to match feature parity for the content producer(s), who are very non-technical in nature.

Gave Publii a try a few months back. My impressions:

the good

Comes with a great, minimalist editor UI built in

The templates available are very well designed

Great SEO defaults (and amp support) out of the box (a huge problem for most SSGs)

the bad

Completely removes the entire value of a SSG for me - custom building features into sites is not at all easy or intuitive

The editor can only be run locally on a single desktop machine - also a non-starter for me

Ultimately I think publii would be great for a humble 1 person blog, with no commercial aspirations.

If you’re trying to build a business, and still want the ease of updating, go with Webflow (or Wordpress, if you’re non-technical).

The editor can only be run locally on a single desktop machine - also a non-starter for me

Publii from multiple computers works fine if you use cloud storage. https://www.google.com/amp/s/getpublii.com/docs/amp/publii-o...

I was wondering how it would handle if two people were editing the same file on two different computers.

You can integrate an e-commerce in Publii with third-party tools, so I think it can actually be used by people with “commercial aspirations”.

It’s interesting to me how much interest SSG’s get and how much bad press WordPress gets. I don’t agree with everything that Mullenweg says but recently he was in an interview where he was saying (along the lines of..): “devs say they need styling, and theming and plugins and comments and a nice ui and then they come up with an alternative to Wordpress, wtf!?” and really, he’s got a point.

On the one hand - if you seriously just want a static site, then just build it by hand. If you want a script to chunk through a bunch of markdown files, then do that. But don’t go thinking that any of these approaches are going to come close to the editor simplicity - or familiarity - of Wordpress. And please, please, please don’t forget that THE EDITORS - the non-technical, content production workhorse - are the people that matter here. Having some elegant dev-centric CMS that has some astonishingly amazing data structure and a whizzy JAMstack style phalange doesn’t mean squit if your editors can’t use it. The point of most sites is the content, and the clue is in the name: a Content management system. If your editors are miserable, your site will be crap, end of.

Then of course there is the “well, it’s hard to maintain” crowd, to which I say either 1) Wordpress.com: free, hosted, secure or 2) ..and you think your groovy jamstack style crazily complex hipster tangled-ness is seriously easier to maintain than a simple LAMP stack?

There is something compelling about a system that dumps static files from Wordpress (I’m building one as a plugin just for a laugh right now) - this way you get the niceness of the editing interface without the (apparent) hosting woes, but throwing out both the familiarity of the interface and then adding in a whole other raft of complexities seems nuts to me.

Headless CMSes have always totally mystified me. I tried to get into them once to try them out and was unable to understand how this was better than either a conventional CMS or just writing fucking HTML.

Headless CMSes are great for when you want to consume the managed content on multiple clients. For example, if you have a bunch of the editorial stuff that you want to present on both an app and websites. We even use the headless CMS for managing copy sent to customers in notifications and emails. It's a quick and easy bridge between editors and tech stacks.

Agencies. WordPress is a commoditised product that puts them on the same level as everybody else. Whereas a bespoke CMS locks clients in, whilst providing a “unique client experience”. It’s “not invented here” syndrome as suffered by business owners.

It’s total bullshit of course, but I think they’re the people who sustain the myth. It’s how you end up with some tiny company that very rarely changes their website having a bespoke CMS.

FWIW the linked SSG CMS isn't your usual directory-with-markdown-and-obsure-scripts, Publii is fully visual editor.

Yeh, I’ve had a play with it in the past. It seems reasonable. But it comes with its own set of complexities and nuances and ultimately I just ended up back at Wordpress, which is where I’d started.

Shout out to webhook.com! This project was just ahead of its time, but I built dozens of sites using it as a Wordpress alternative and it was awesome.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8093324

Site seems to be down. Is it still supported?

Long dead

I tried this a couple years ago and I found the quality to not be as good or as flexible as jekyll with a Netlify cms.

(Not that setting up Jekyll is easy though)

What were you missing? I have an idea about a service with: domain + Jekyll + CD pipeline in my backlog for a long time now.

One important reason that is often overlooked is that static sites are cheaper to host since they don't require a preprocessor that consumes server resources. In the future maybe there is cheap hosting for Rust/C++ web preprocessors (resource-efficient = low cost) and static generators will be less of a thing..

I have tried some SSG (hugo, hexo, gatsby) until a few months ago I discovered Publii. The UI is nice and it allows to rapidly start 'something'.While there are still some bugs I find it great and decided to go on with it. It uses sqlite to store data. For some reasons I would have preferred a different way like separated folders with assets and markdown files.

I just found Nicepage[1] and creating a template with it for my brother for portfolio, articles and other creative work.

[1]: https://nicepage.com/Editor/Siteboard/

imo, the best part of this pattern is the use of git as a backend (gitlab/github pages support) democratizing deployment pipelines and git history/branching for your every day CMS users

we need more things like this... netlifycms, etc...

if anyone is looking for an idea of something to build, i think a web framework for providing configuration pages for... anything... via a git based workflow, where committing and branching are first class citizens would be incredibly useful, i've heard that many configuration systems are designed this way at FAANG

What are the features that are still missing from static site generators ?

A user interface for non technical users. Which is a real shame because a static CMS is conceptually simpler than a dynamic one, yet WordPress in still the king in this space. Current SSGs are missing out on an untapped niche by burying all their features behind developer-oriented config files and flags when they could be rolled into a nice front-end UI that any non technical user could use. Publii seems to be a promising attempt in that regard.

Netlify CMS is nice, and despite the name it works completely independenly of using Netlify as the host: https://www.netlifycms.org/docs/intro/ I won't lie though it is very akward to setup and use if you aren't using Netlify--documentation is extremely thin, and it's a beta phase feature to selfhost. But it is a really nice and simple editor view that non-technical people could use. This is where the (very thin) documentation for self hosting it outside Netlify starts: https://www.netlifycms.org/docs/beta-features/#working-with-...

Another good one is Jekyll Admin: https://github.com/jekyll/jekyll-admin It's not as nice as wordpress but gets the job done for a basic markdown focused site. Selfhosting it is a lot easier and more documented than Netlify CMS.

Well, it does require making a good desktop editor which isn't something many developers are interested into these days. Publii is a desktop application but even that is an Electron app (which doesn't even take advantage of it being an Electron app and having an entire browser engine underneath and requires you to open the generated site in your browser instead).

www.cloudcannon.com

Integration with design/mockup tools.

This goes some way to addressing that, but it's a proprietary tool for theme tweaking rather than something like Figma, but for production templates

Stackbit Studio is the closest thing to that I've seen so far.

You may be interested in www.plasmic.app, which is a web design tool/page builder that targets SSGs and imports from Figma. (I work on this.)

I tried, then dropped it because it does not support GitHub. This one integration could unlock so much potential that I would take gh over gh pages any day.

Maybe look again? https://getpublii.com/docs/host-static-website-github-pages....

github pages != github

I need some good resources on how to make themes for this.

Which site generation stack do people prefer for a workflow of markdown and latex?

Hugo is very popular. I used it at work for internal sites, it's incredibly easy to work with. Latex can be enabled by JS libraries.

I would recommend TinyMCE and then some of your own adjustments

I wrote https://writer.math.dev , it supports markdown and latex

It can export to HTML and you can create your own custom stylesheets to do layout

You have to add the MathJax script & configuration to your HTML header (I probably should just put this in by default)

But my main point is that you can create your own workflow easy and I highly recommend you using TinyMCE as your input editor. It’s freaking super easy to use and super powerful

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