Show HN: Build custom designed CMS sites in the browser without any coding | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Build custom designed CMS sites in the browser without any coding

pinegrow.com

25 pointsmattront21 comments

That's all well and good until people start wanting more power over the development. It would be nice if these projects that started out with a clear goal and intentions stayed this way.

The unfortunate truth is CMS's are ten a penny these days and to knock the big boys off is near impossible

Yes it looks good, yes it looks promising but yes there are 100's of CMS's already built out there that do this exact job.

Good luck with the endeavour but I think you are about 5 years too late

Thanks for your feedback! Our unique value proposition is that designers can build custom site templates quickly, without coding. Most existing solutions (Weebly for example) require coding html / css templates for implementing custom site design. Our target market are designers who don't have a lot of coding skills or those who don't want to deal with coding for smaller projects.

Did you do any research to validate that designers want something like this?

Yes. We did a lot of client web development work (Pinegrow evolved from there) and we often work with designers who need us to turn their designs into a functional site. Many designers are not coders and have no interest in dealing with nuances of html, css and javascript. They are very interested in Pinegrow as a development tool, backed up by good technical customer support.

What other CMS's do what PineGrow does (complete customized creation without coding)?

There was a drag and drop product released a few years ago that did just this. I can't remember the name of it now and it's dropped off the face of the planet.

My point really was that people will always want more, more power over what they can do and it's quite easy to lose scope and start putting more power into the solution.

We developed our own CMS at our company, it's not for outside world usage but for internal so it's not that I am adverse to the development of them. If I was a company though, I see no issue in downloading Wordpress and buying a template. You get the added knowledge that you can get 1000's of widgets and you can virtually drop them anywhere onto the design of your choice.

I sincerely do wish the develops all the best in such a competitive market and hope that the niche they offer hits off with designers.

I'll i'm saying is, don't lose scope.

Making up lies is an interesting way to get your point across.

I'm sorry, what lies am I making up?

I do love a good keyboard warrior

The demo is impressive. I guess many people would be interested in this. I would pitch it on Forrst and Dribble where a lot of designers hang out.

From the demo I see that most dimensions are determined the wysiwyg way. Can you serve different resolutions like those used by smartphones, tablets, PCs/Macs and printers and are the layouts fluid?

Yes, fluid designs are possible. We are also working on option to specify media based rules for individual elements including serving different image resolutions to different devices. The main idea is to have one set of content that is then published in appropriate form to individual publishing channels.

Great to hear. People will like it. Non-fluid designs and missing media support are what I hear most when talking about CMS'es. There will always be different levels of site building in the future and your product fits in between them:

    - Simple page builders
    - Engines with prebuilt themes
    - Engines with custom themes
    - Your Pinegrow 
    - Designed PSDs converted into themes
    - Individually programmed sites using frameworks
    - Totally custom built sites

First thing that struck me was professional designers probably wouldn't use this, they're likely not willing to give up complete design control to a wysiwyg tool, and most have preferred cms and tools.

So with that said, seems the best target is hobbyists, casuals, or people like small business owners who want to save a buck by trying to make their own site (I know several small business owners who have rolled their own site with dreamweaver, for example)

I'd love to see it with a landing video that talks about the problem it solves for people with no experience, rather than using terms like "standards compliant", "hosting platform", etc.

In addition to DIY market we also have those designers who until now had to hire a programmer to turn their designs into a functional website (with cms or without). Thanks for the landing video suggestion!

True, but I would have thought most designers like that would work at a web dev shop already, thought I couldn't say that for sure.

Forgot to mention: Looks like a great piece of tech and a great product. Can't wait to see where it goes after launch :D

Don't know about anyone else but the submit button isn't working for me.

There was a delay with sending form submissions through email. I disabled it, works much better now.

It seems pretty slick!

Cool, looks interesting. I look forward to checking out its features.

Looks wonderful!

God, please, anything but Vimeo... I can't watch it on my phone. I could use a PC, but I cannot do it right now.

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