Project Helix by Adobe
hlx.live
hlx.live
> Helix dynamically renders HTML via Markdown that is generated from the content source documents. Markdown provides an abstraction as well as filter for content created in the various different data sources and strips all the formatting that cannot easily be projected into HTML semantics. This means you don’t have to worry about authors picking the wrong font, size, or color, Helix will take care that your final site looks as the design specs say.
So it's just generating a markdown document from my Word document and dynamically renders that to HTML. It seems like a weird SSG that isn't static, relies on proprietary files stored in either Google Drive or SharePoint, and seems to be aimed at Content Creators that are not tech savy at all (why else would you prefer Word over md files?).
However all that is still very confusing and it looks a bit like the project changed direction during development (e.g. there's still mention of GitHub as file storage which has been discontinued in the faqs etc.) I still don't see who would use this for their site.
The hard part in maintaining a website by a team of non-geeks is not a Markdown renderer, but the fact that people have their own preferred tools and workflows, and aren't keen on learning yet another one. All the extra export/import/sync steps are a pain for them, and cause chaos when collaborating. You update the Markdown version, someone else changes the Word version instead, a third person hates Word, and someone else puts notes on GitHub, and now you need to train half a dozen people how to clone a repo and how to fix a detached head.
People might like to pass around a draft before publishing an article. Maybe to an editor for feedback. That’s easiest done with a Word document.
Then, when you’re ready to publish, just save the file to the right location. It’s easier than opening an CMS and copying/pasting (marginally).
Ages ago (probably more than 15 years or so) I generated HTML, even multi-page web sites from within Word itself, using VBA. It required some proficiency in VBA but Word already had a structure that you could translate with different classes of headings, font modifications, etc. - so it wasn't exactly "rocket science" either. I did the same in Excel, but here more focused on autogenerating pseudo "db-driven" sites than on prose.
Typically these would be "intranet" apps, but I believe some may have been exposed to the www. Being static sites, security was like any other pure HTML site.
> I still don't see who would use this for their site.
My customers were in marketing. They already used these Office tools and they found it a real advantage that they could just continue to use these tools.
This was before WP got to the dominant position (and level of user-friendlyness) it has today. It's still possible though.
I understand: Speed - ok, the same can do other platforms
Migration - ok same can do othe rplatforms
Create content in Microsoft Word or Google Docs - realy Adobe?
Stop wasting developer time on framework churn - start wasting time on Helix.
In the top menu click "Getting Started / Build your first site". And that tells you how exactly it works.
Do you want even more details? Click "Documentation / Architecture"
Are you seeing the same page I'm seeing? I'm confused by all these complaints.
Is it a menstrual tracker?
Of all the places I expected to see a top comment attacking Adobe for killing flash… yea actually nevermind, it’s backwards enough to make sense here ;)
Open source the Flash Player code and work towards properly defining the SWF format. They could have kept their shiny IDE that a ton of people knew how to use and work with but also made it possible for Flash to become part of the open web - since it was actually useful.
This is something that they were repeatedly asked to do, but never ended up doing because Adobe wanted to have full control over it - and ended up having full control of something dead.
This sounds easy, but it isn't. Major commercial closed-source projects often include third-party software which itself isn't under OSS licenses, and publishing the project without violating those licenses means removing them from the code base before open sourcing it (which may result in a completely non-functional project), negotiating with the provider of the third-party software to allow for their code to be open-sourced (probably impossible), or replacing the licensed code with free alternatives (which may not exist, most likely have a different API if they do exist, and would take developer resources to develop from scratch).
All this preparation for OSSing the code base takes work, and where's the bottom line? How would Adobe, a public company with shareholders and all that nonsense, profit from OSSing Flash? It wouldn't make them business sense to do so.
That's not to say this sort of thing never happens (see Netscape and Mozilla), but it's just never as simple as "they should just release the source."
[0]: https://alternativeto.net/software/flash-player/?license=ope...
The payback on open-sourcing something like Flash is maintaining trust. I trust open-source. I trust a few commercial companies who invest like crazy in maintaining trust (e.g. Microsoft or AWS). That leads to business on unrelated product lines down-the-line.
But that isn't the point though since the question was what was expected them to do, not how easy that would be.
Flash had so so much against it even thouh it had a lot of things that make it sound like such a perfect solution. Write once, deploy anywhere...except there's a lot of baggage we're not going to tell you about. Eventually, that baggage is well understood and then exploited. The damn player released by the maker was the main vector before even running code written by any 14 year old. This was all before Jobs' little letter.
Aside from that, Adobe has like 100 other pieces of software that creators have trusted going back to the early 80s. They have sustained millions and millions of successful careers.
https://services.harman.com/partners/adobe
"wasting number of years of their careers on dead horse"
The world keeps changing, it's on you for putting all your money on a horse that was obviously not going to make it.
I wouldn't fault Adobe for at least trying to find a future for the technology they spent a lot of R&D on. I certainly wouldn't call them liars. If you missed the very public industry shift towards Javascript and HTML5, that's on you.
Since then I switched to PixelmatorPro and it works for all my needs.
For the folks who are unaware, AEM is a tier 1 CMS powering many top-shelf enterprise websites[1], competing with products Contentful, Contentstack, Salesforce, etc.
I’m personally not a huge fan of their solution but they tick many of the boxes clients typically ask for.
[1] https://trends.builtwith.com/cms/Adobe-Experience-Manager
It’ll be interesting to see how this develops…
[0] https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/cm-adobeexperiencem...
Wix, Squarespace, and Shopify are Tier 3 CMSs at best.
Drupal, (managed) WordPress, Joomla, Cake, Webflow etc. are Tier2.
AEM, Sitecore, BloomReach, Contentful, Contentstack, etc. are Tier 1
The CMS ecosystem is further segmented into products that are headless, decoupled, hybrid, and monolithic. To complicate things, there is a new type of product called DXP (Digital Experience Platform), which mixes in marketing systems into the stack.
The hate here in the comments seem to be around developers thinking they are the target group of this product when they are clearly not.
"You can use Helix for small sites because it is very easy to get started, but it works best for large sites with many authors, frequent updates, and lots of traffic."
Which confuses me a bit about which kind of pages they intended to be created in Helix. They also talk about Stripe integration for e-commerce shops.
I could see it being used for short-lived high traffic sites like festivals, concerts, movie landing pages and other typical agency-created sites. These might have multiple authors to public posts, FAQ items and some small e-commerce components.
Let me guess, whatever it is requires a Creative Cloud subscription?
I do remember when I was excited about Adobe stuff. 20 years ago. Since then, their virus-like “install a million things just to run Photoshop” and awful licensing practises have put them next to Oracle in the “avoid at all cost” category.
https://www.fonedog.com/powermymac/adobe-creative-cloud-wont...
> there are some reasons that may make you want to uninstall it from your Mac. When you try to remove it, you may find that it is not easy to delete it thoroughly.
https://www.drbuho.com/how-to/uninstall-creative-cloud-mac
The internet is full of articles and people who cannot uninstall Adobe CC.
A lot of the articles out there are trying to sell cleaning software so they make it look harder than it is.
Works for me. Ticket closed :)
I'm rooting for Affinity, because of the buy vs rent business model and because Adobe need competition, but they still have a long ways to go
I think there’s much to be done to compete with a general purpose vector tool like Illustrator.
But Photoshop is harder to replace.
I’m not super confident that Affinity will be able to do it. Feature development seems to have really, really slowed down. The gap between Adobe and Affinity has grown, rather than shrank. Yeah Affinity’s software has a lot of the same main features, but it’s like MS Word where there is a long tail of very useful features where hardly anyone uses all of them, but everyone uses a few. Affinity hasn’t even come close to integrating those kinds of features.
Most procurement teams just love suppliers who will give them big quotes and then provide a 50% 'discount' so they can get a great big bonus for all the savings they achieved. Maybe i'm being too pessimistic.
I worked for a large company (>£50bn revenue) that used to do this in the UK - I had to sign off the 'savings' my procurement stakeholders achieved on the projects (you had to 'agree' their savings and sign them off) because that would go into their performance reports which then triggered their bonus. So it happens.
What else do you think procurement teams get targeted on if not savings/price decreases?
So what do procurement teams hate? Things purchased from a single supplier, with no competition/accepted substitute, and no/little ability to negotiate the price or payment terms.
That is also my experience with procurement. That's their whole reason d´etre
I think it's hilarious there are 20 comments here, and all are voicing confusion at what the product is and does?
I don't understand why people insist in not explaining what it is they're selling in a clear, simple manner.
I can’t remember which but there was a post about this, in the context of cloud service providers, a few weeks ago, on Hackernews Top. Will add if I can find it.
There's really something wrong if you have to put a question to FAQ list to tell what your product is and that question is not the first one in the list.
How do I interact with it? What’s the value add? What’s the use case? Why would I even want this thing?
Such a low effort site as well, ugly design and i found at least a couple dead links that redirect back to the homepage (e.g. https://www.hlx.live/business/project-plan)
It seems to be a way of generating a website from a shared google drive or MS sharepoint setup.
The google drive documents act as content which is mixed with templates to generate a website.
But it doesn't seem to be static site generator, more like wordpress with google drive (or sharepoint) as the content database?
But then it also talks about the helix team doing work for you? So it's maybe more of a service to create websites than a technology stack?
It seems like there are some interesting ideas, but it also feels like there should be more explanation.
The only one I could make out was blog.adobe.com - and by the looks of it that was no small feat to make such a conversion happen.
Very unhappy, even more so seeing Adobe trying to get away with a barebones product explanation.
EDIT: Ok, after going through the comments in this thread - it looks like Adobe doesn't even intend to have this site published yet. That's my impression of it also.
“Helix has reinvigorated my passion for coding. The simplicity of building something great and seeing it used by our visitors the next day is a joy like no other. Kenny”
Who's Kenny? Has no one reviewed this page? I hope that's not a signal of how important this project really is to Adobe.
It's on Wayback Machine, but the indexing breaks the page. One must inspect the source code.
https://web.archive.org/web/20220704092727/https://www.hlx.l...
And what's with the code? Why not use TypeScript, at least?
https://github.com/adobe/helix-website/blob/main/tools/sidek...
Examples:
> Helix dynamically renders HTML via Markdown that is generated from the content source documents.
Markdown is a lossy format. Sometimes that's good (it'll strip unwanted Word formatting), but there are vital things that get lost too. (The easiest to grasp are the internationalisation issues, like mixing right-to-left and left-to-right scripts in the same paragraph, or multiple language spans.)
> To add metadata to your page, create a table like this at the end of the document
And how is this better than an actual tool, with actual field validation, helpful UX, etc? It's not: it's undiscoverable magic boxes with inexplicable (to the user) side-effects that oblige users to remember secret incantations (or sticky them to their screens) and hope everything works out all right.
This is the opposite of "intuitive and fast". Which anybody familiar with AEM won't be surprised by.
It looks like brackets may have some others keeping it alive.
The project helix page comes off quite hilarious on mobile for me. "these aren't the droids you're looking for" followed closely by an uncaptioned screenshot and then a long scroll of a blank orange canvas only to be greeted at the bottom with "You can go about your business."
It is a bizarre product in the sense that the typical web developer has never heard of it, whilst it's one of the most powerful (and complex) CMS systems out there. Given its license costs, you'll only find it in large companies.
It's a stunningly powerful but also complicated platform. Still, it's a CMS on steroids with some truly eye-opening ideas.
"Is Helix a good solution for landing pages?
https://pages.adobe.com is a great example how Adobe uses Helix to manage hundreds of landing pages, owned by dozens of independent teams."
I imagine someone on the team felt very strongly Wix might still have the advantage if they can't secure a 3 letter domain name.
If you are impatient, a developer, or both, take a look at the Helix Developer Tutorial in the meantime.
I dont get it VIP??? Really?? AEM Sites? Whats that?
Are you from marketing?
That whole site seems like excessive marketing fluff written by someone who’s been living and breathing whatever this project is for years.
Assume I have no idea what it does or why I’d want it. Use small words and no acronyms. Also, less words. Then, as simply as possible, tell me what it is and what it does for me from a technical standpoint. I’ll decide for myself if it’s useful.
I think this is unfair criticism. Right at the top it says:
"Helix is the fastest way to launch new sites and deliver the fastest pages on the web, as a bonus it is also the most intuitive and fastest way to create and publish content."
That is what it is and that is why you would want to use it. It is a way to create new websites fast. And it promises that those websites will be fast, and you will be able to update them fast.
These are small and simple words.
2. Claiming to be “fastest” is usually a good way to get your ass handed to you.
Helix let’s [sic] frontend devs develop and deploy the design and functionality of their website with CSS and JavaScript directly in their GitHub repos.
- cut and pasted from near the bottom of the page