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Comment by evanelias | Hacker News Reader

No, even with past static site generator experience, it can still be a struggle.

I had extremely extensive experience with Movable Type, which was a once-hugely-popular blogging platform / CMS / static site generator. And by "extremely extensive", I mean I worked for the company that made the software, in their Services org which built Movable Type-driven sites for major media partners.

Despite this, and also already having Golang html/template experience, Hugo's docs and concepts were still very difficult for me to learn!

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Almost off-topic, but I continue to be mildly surprised that there's so few "modern" blogging platform/site generators that use Movable Type's model: a full user-friendly publishing/admin back end, backed by a database rather than flat files, but still basically generating static files for output. The SSGs that Jekyll arguably led the rise of have still largely stayed in the realm of developer tooling -- edit a directory of flat files and do testing, building and deployment from the command line. There's a few PHP-based systems out there that buck this trend, but they seem to mostly be commercial products pitched at small web design firms (e.g., Kirby, Statamic, Craft).

One of the big reasons I lean toward static sites for my stuff is that you can host them out of an S3 bucket or similar with no dynamic endpoints whatsoever. This is a huge win for security for projects that I don't have time to keep constantly updating. A web-based admin backend largely eliminates that value unless it's run off a separate port that I can firewall, and even then I have to be sure I firewalled it correctly.

There is a space that I'd like to explore, though, and that's having a static site generator that is built into a desktop-based GUI. My dream is to get the brain-dead security of an SSG without having to fiddle about with files and folder structures.

Lektor, a Python-based SSG that I've used in the past, actually had a self-contained Mac app for a while that was maybe 75% of the way toward that. (IIRC, the app didn't let you edit templates and most site-level configuration; the idea was more that you got things set up in a more programmer-nerd way first and then used the app for site maintenance/deployment.) Unfortunately, the app broke a few years back and nobody left developing Lektor seems motivated to fix it.

I've seen one other SSG that has an app, Publii, but I've never used it. My impression is that it wasn't as full-featured as Lektor, which could be made to do a lot of neat things. Although if Publii's app still works, that's one big thing Lektor doesn't have, so... :P

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1749618880/webhook

RIP - 5 or 6 years ahead of its time.

I think you’re looking for Primo: https://primo.so

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