Show HN: Kit55, a Desktop Web Builder GUI – Jekyll, Next, WordPress Alternative | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Kit55, a Desktop Web Builder GUI – Jekyll, Next, WordPress Alternative

stack55.com

52 pointsmiki_tyler62 comments

So, uh, what benefits does this offer over existing, usually CLI-based, solutions? As far as I can tell it's a rather simplistic GUI wrapper around a static site generator - running in Electron, no less.

I'm not trying to come off as snarky - I am genuinely confused what benefits this offers over Jekyll or Hugo.

Simplicity ;) . There are a lot of use cases and user types out there. Not all of them want to deal with a CLI.

<Raises hand> I for one!

Service looks cool. Just an fyi: Your homepage has elements misaligned - and while that's usually forgivable for most product MVPs, a homepage marketing a website builder should get that right.

Hey, thanks for letting us know!, which elements? Our homepage looks ok in our laptops.

Not sure if it's what he's talking about, but I noticed that if I resize Safari narrow enough, the "Download Free" button is left-aligned while all the text around is center-aligned.

This reminds me of Joel Spolsky's CityDesk[1]. It was quite a nice piece of software but lost out to Wordpress.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/10/12/what-does-citydesk...

I love Joel, but I didn't know about CityDesk, thanks!

I don't see any benefit of using this over an online website builder like Wordpress, Shopify or Square. The site gives no comparisons though your HN title compares it to others. Also, all of this can be accomplished in VSCode with extensions and minimal effort, so I honestly do see who your target audience is for this... is it newbies? cause they are going to us a gui website builder, not a coder. dev who code by hand? VSCode already dominates this space and is completely free. If you're looking to be a niche editor like Sublime Text or Textmate then I wish you luck but honestly I don't see your product bringing anything to the space that is already crowded.

Online website builders are not for everybody. If you need something custom added, most of the time, it is hard to make it work, you know, Pareto 80/20 rule. Your files are hosted in their cloud. If you run into issues you have to deal with their customer service. They are also slow compared to your file system. Regarding what you said about VSCode with extensions, there are a lot of use cases and user types out there. I, for one, wouldn't touch VSCode with a ten-foot pole.

You wouldn't touch VSCode with a ten foot pole, but your product is essentially just a less capable VSCode. Seems a bit disingenuous.

Kit55 is not a code editor. We don't compete with VSCode. You can use VSCode with Kit55 if you want to.

https://wordpress.org/plugins/simply-static/

Not affiliated, just a sometime happy user.

LiveCanvas is also pretty cool. Helps you build it visually and it’s all pure static. https://livecanvas.com/

We wrote an article about pros/cons of online solutions vs WordPress vs CLI solutions vs Kit55 a few days ago: https://medium.com/@mickey_55/kit55-an-unconventional-tool-f...

This somewhat reminds me of Lektor[0], which is a sort of front-end GUI application (really just website/page in front of a locally-run web server) that allows for folks to edit and post content as a static site generator and without needing a CLI. Lektor happens to be open source and based on python. This also reminds me of MovableType! Either way, I think we need more of these types of tools; both for techs and non-techs alike! Best of luck to the Kit55 folks!

[0] = https://www.getlektor.com/

I didn't know about Lektor, it looks cool! Thanks for letting us know!

There is also PineGrow

https://pinegrow.com/

Do you expect the average WordPress user to edit HTML directly and upload it to a webserver? The examples seem to mostly show this as a GUI for compiling (not editing) Jinja templates, while WordPress does a lot more. The quickstart shows directly editing HTML files with the only example of non-html being an `include` statement and a link to the Jinja docs.

Is this not more comparable to using php's built in templating options than it is to a full CMS?

We are not in the business of code editors, users can use their favorite one with Kit55. For me just the fact that I can use template inheritance makes the product wonderful. Jinja templates are very powerful, and this is just the first minimal iteration of our product.

Would it be fair to say that currently the product only compiles Jinja, with recompile-on-save? If not, what else does it do?

Sort of. The app watches for changes in the fs and builds pages accordingly. It also embeds a small web server that provides hot-reloading. It also keeps a dependency tree to optimize compilation, deals with static files... etc.

Our approach with this product is that less is more. It was a challenge to make something useful without bloating the UI.

I guess my question is how many people know jinja (I'm guessing you need to fix errors, etc. manually?), how to deploy a website (since you need to upload the files somewhere), know HTML/CSS/JS (since you need to edit those files directly), but find running the two cli commands or IDE plugins a blocker/painful?

I agree that less-is-more is a interesting and probably-good path to take, but just bolting a GUI compiler on top of a templating language that does not follow a less-is-more philosophy seems to make this too much on one side and too little on another.

Think about it this way - there is no practical way you can make a website today without resorting to either CLIs or online solutions. That is the void we fill. Jinja is great, and you can dig deep into all the features it provides, but you can get real far with just including external templates or using template inheritance, which are very basic. Kit55 works on top of your file system, so your workflow can be as simple or as complicated as you need it to be. To give you an example, we use git to sync projects across team members, then we use Kit55 to work on the site, and then firebase to deploy, and the process feels very light.

> no practical way you can make a website today without resorting to either CLIs or online solutions

So after I use my HTML editor to build my Kit55 site, how do I show it to others? Perhaps via "online solutions"? Can you explain to me how I without using online solutions or CLIs show my page to others?

I'm sorry if I'm being combative but I really don't get what the actual problem being solved here is. Is your competition jekyll, github pages (which can handle the jekyll bit), wordpress or squarespace? Because those all solve different problems.

> I'm sorry if I'm being combative

No worries. We've built Kit55 for us and we think some other people might find it useful.

Hmmm.... that icon.

I'd offer to create a new one for you if I understood what "55" was referring to. (All I can think of is the 55 MPH speed limit from decades ago.)

lol - we are developers, we don't really have an eye for design ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Considering this is basically design software, that could be a problem

That's quite a stretch to make that association; and it's one that by my observation, very few current HN readers would be old enough to know.

Kit55 is just a name. There are many worse names. What was a "Twitter"? It was nonsense, but now it seems normal. I could provide many more examples, since the web is full of nonsense/non-word names.

Not putting the price on the website is a turn off for me. I don't want to explore a tool without knowing how much it will cost me before hand.

Good point. We will add more features in the near future, for which users will need to get a license, but our model is very close to what Sublime Text or some others offer, where there is always a free option for evaluation or non professional use.

You might want to change the wording to reflect that. As it stands now, it seems to say "evaluate for free, a license is required for any real use, personal or otherwise". At least, that's how I interpreted it.

That makes a lot of sense. Thanks for the feedback!

Please don't make me request a demo via email. Upload a video and name your price. I don't want to be convinced by talking with a salesman in a call. If I like what I see in the video, I'll pay for Pro without arguing.

So please make the commercial option more visible and transparent -- without people having to email you.

lol - no worries, there will be no demos.

It looks interesting, but I wouldn't even download or use it for free, knowing I have to send out an email just to find out what the pricing tiers are (even for an individual user) and what is/is not included. Are you willing to publicly share that information?

Since you explicitly mention Sublime Text: their pricing is listed on their website and they have a clear 'Buy' button. Not sure why you would share that your pricing is similar and name a specific product, but also appear unwilling to display what the pricing and featureset is.

It is early days for us! We are not showing the pricing tiers because we don't have them. We jut want to put the free/demo evrsion out there asap, so we can gather feedback. Looking into it now, you are 100% right and it is unfortunate that we "appear unwilling to display what the pricing", it is not our intention at all.

Another weird thing that vendors do is requiring work email. I put my Gmail at internal.io, it wouldn’t let me sign up.

I found two competitors, signed up to both with Gmail and paying for one. Not my loss, doesn’t bother me.

What is the logic behind all these stupid rules? Money is money, customer is a customer whether they have gmail or some other fancy email, right?

I suspect they want to be able to contact your employer and say "$large_number of your employees use our software as individuals, here a all the reasons you should give us a fuckload of money for enterprise-ready best-of-breed annoyance^Wmanagement features".

"Next WordPress Alternative"

The moment you do this, you are setting the bar way too high. Lot of companies/products have tried to beat WordPress over the years.

I would focus on other benefits and go from there. If you truly want to be a WordPress alternative, you have at least 10 years to try.

Totally, I see what you are saying, but it also depends on what is what you are trying to do. For certain users and use cases, Kit55 is a good alternative.

Many companies are also doing Atlassian alternatives. It doesn't mean they're trying to implement everything the Atlassian piece of software does, just the most important parts.

I'm excited to try this.

I love Jekyll so much that I've foolishly tried to pigeonhole it into situations where I really needed a CMS.

I also hate the drudgery of building websites one line of HTML, CSS, and JS at a time.

Yes, that is exactly the reason why we built the product - just scratching our own itch.

Is it capable of importing an existing theme to edit?

That's something I find myself wanting to do. I find a Jekyll theme somewhere online that's 90% of what I like, but I never have the time or patience to do all the work to tweak it.

Kit55 comes with a sample site that is kind of self-explanatory but you can download any plain HTML theme from the internet and use it as the base for your own project.

We do work a lot ourselves with tailwind templates, as there are a lot of sites out there that provide functional blocks (e.g. https://tailblocks.cc) that can be easily made into HTML template files (Kit55 building blocks).

We just added a few sample templates (https://stack55.com/samples/) that I thought you might find interesting. They are fully customizable.

The title had me interested. Seeing the comments here saved me from clicking over. I don't consider things that don't show pricing.

Sounds like it'd need to be cheaper than pinegrow and better than bluegriffon to have a spot to consider at this point.

I'm always looking for the replacement for netobjects fusion, so far pinegrow is the closest.

Sorry to hear that. We just want to put the free/demo version in front of users, so we can gather feedback asap.

We are not showing the pricing tiers simply because we don't have any yet; we don't even have the infrastructure to support payments.

As I said to other community member below, it is unfortunate that we "appear unwilling to display the pricing", it is not our intention at all.

Listening to the feedback from HN, we have updated our landing page to clarify that Kit55 is free for non professional use.

We are a small group of developers, we don't really know much about marketing/design/sales - unfortunately most of the feedback we are gathering today is about that.

We will fix those issues but we would love if you could take a look at the product itself.

I appreciate the response and where you all are at. Perhaps a more consumer oriented place may offer better feedback for where you all are in the process?

"if you could take a look at the product itself. "

- I specifically said that: "I don't consider things that don't show pricing."

This is not just you - many other products on HN and in the software world - when I see 'contact us for pricing' or anything like that - I run.. I don't waste any more time, I do not bookmark.

With so many things to learn (and so much to do) - I can't waste time playing with tools not knowing the cost after I've invested the time to try things out.

In this particular area, as I mentioned, if the price was way lower than pinegrow (lifetime ownership, not some 1 year license type scheme) - I would poke around to see if it could be used. Otherwise I have more mature options already and don't need to spend any time with it.

I'd also compare it to bluegriffon, and even webflow and figma, wordpress, all the things - but price needs to be a known factor before looking at anything else.

And if it turns out to be some sort of monthly / yearly kind of thing, I won't invest the time to use it either. That's just where I am at with most things I use.

I also read terms of use before I spend more time delving into how useful a product is - of course if it's buy it, and own it on your desktop - that's not usually a problem.

I agree with you and in general my approach to software subscriptions/purchases is very similar.

Hey guys, we just added some extra info on the landing page to clarify that Kit55 is free for non professional use - it was not very clear in the previous version of the site. Also notice that we are not showing pricing tiers yet because we don't have them! We just want to put the free/demo version out there asap.

After looking through the website I'm quite confused. It looks like you just edit HTML/CSS as you normally would with the many static site generators out there.

What part of it is the GUI builder? I was expecting to see something like a wordpress drag and drop style setup.

The GUI builds pages assembling HTML templates (building blocks) that you have to provide. Basically it allows you to use Jinja expressions, variables, macros, etc.

You use your own editor to work on your files. Kit55 will detect changes and recompile complete pages using your building blocks. You can keep a browser open and Kit55 will update your pages in your browser as well.

I totally see what you mentioned about dnd style editor. Can you think of a better alternative way to describe the tool?

My experience is just limited hobby stuff, but it sounds very similar to the other static site generators out there I've used that do auto-reload on changes.

Yup agree. I can’t count the times I redlined a vendor for not making pricing easily available on their website if it’s not available through distribution channels. Congrats and luck on your venture!

Thanks! We will add pricing as soon as we have it ready. We have changed the landing page to reflect that Kit55 is free for non professional users as well.

You probably want to remove the "UNREGISTERED" from the screenshot of Sublime Text on the homepage. Or maybe... purchase a Sublime Text license? :)

*WordPress

Sorry for the typo! I don't think I can edit the headline.

I was wrong, updated!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com