Hacker News Reader

Comment by aaronbaugher | Hacker News Reader

Can you recommend an alternative for a non-technical organization, where there's someone who needs to be able to edit pages and upload documents on a regular basis, so they need as user-friendly an interface as possible for that? Especially when they don't have a budget for it, and you're helping them out as a favor? It's so easy to spin up Wordpress for them, but I'm not a fan either.

I've tried Drupal in the past for such situations, but it was too complicated for them. That was years ago, so maybe it's better now.

View on HN

I find it very telling that there's no 2 responses to this post recommending the same thing. Confirms my belief that there is no real alternative to Wordpress for a free and open-source CMS that is straightforward to install and usable to build and edit pages by non-tech-experts.

Perhaps people who wanted to recommend the same thing as was already written, just upvoted instead of writing their own comment?

DrupalCMS is a new project that aims to radically simplify for end users https://new.drupal.org/drupal-cms

> Drupal

> new

Pretty sure Drupal has been around for like, 20 years or so. Or is this a different Drupal?

Drupal has been around for a while, but I've never heard of "Drupal CMS" as a separate product until now.

It appears Drupal CMS is a customized version of Drupal that is easier for less tech-savvy folks to get up and running. At least, that's the impression I got reading through the marketing hype that "explains" it with nothing but buzzwords.

Yes I can. There's an excellent and stable solution called SurrealCMS, made by an indie developer. You connect it by FTP to any traditional web design (HTML+CSS+JS), and the users get a WYSIWYG editor where the published output looks exactly as it looked when editing. It's dirt cheap at $9 per month.

Edit: I actually feel a bit sorry for the SurrealCMS developer. He has a fantastic product that should be an industry standard, but it's fairly unknown.

> Can you recommend an alternative for a non-technical organization, where there's someone who needs to be able to edit pages and upload documents on a regular basis, so they need as user-friendly an interface as possible for that

25 years ago we used Microsoft Frontpage for that, with the web root mapped to a file share that the non-technical secretary could write to and edit it as if it were a word processor.

Somehow I feel we have regressed from that simplicity, with nothing but hand waving to make up for it. This method was declared "obsolete" and ... Wordpress kludges took its place as somehow "better". Someone prove me wrong.

Part of that is Frontpage needing a Windows server, and all that entails.

The other part is clients freaking out after Frontpage had a series of dangerous CVEs all in a row.

And then finally every time a part of Frontpage got popular, MS would deprecate the API and replace it with a new one.

Wordpress was in the right place at the right time.

Yeah, getting Frontpage working on a Linux/Apache system and supporting it back then wasn't exactly a treat. Good idea, maybe, but bad implementation.

I think you're mistaken. The use of WebDAV was not a requirement. Frontpage could function in "HTML editor" mode and just write to the filesystem. In that case, any WYSIWYG editor would do but FP was there and available.

A previous workplace of mine did the same with Netscape (and later, Mozilla) Composer. Users could modify content via WebDAV.

For those on macOS, RapidWeaver still exists: https://www.realmacsoftware.com/rapidweaver/. (Shame that it's now subscriptionware, though – could've sworn it used to be an outright purchase per major version.)

“best viewed with Internet Explorer in 1024x768”

Statamic https://statamic.com/

YES! I have switched to it for professional and personal CMS work and it's great. Incredibly flexible and simplistic in my opinion. I use it both as headful and headless.

weird "license" on that project. pretty much blocks any self host usage besides a personal blog.

And only hosted option for the copyrighted code starts at 300/y

these don't cover any use case people use WordPress for.

Not sure why sibling was downvoted to oblivion, the license could be easier to find. Here it is: https://statamic.com/license

Seconded. It's absolutely phenomenal as a headful or headless CMS.

We have a (internally accessible only) WP instance where the content is exported using a plugin as a ZIP file and then deployed to NGINX servers with a bit of scripting/Ansible.

Could be automated better (drop ZIP to a share somewhere where it gets processed and deployed) but best of both worlds.

Which plugin?

Good question - didn’t set it up myself, but nothing too obscure I think

I've had some luck using Decap for that. An initial dev setup, followed by almost never needing support from the PR team running it.

[0] https://decapcms.org/

We’re developing https://bluocms.com/

- very hard to hack because we pre render all assets to a Cloudflare kv store

- public website and CMS editor are on different domains

Basically very hard to hack. Also as a bonus is much more reliable as it will only go down when Cloudflare does.

You need to build your own frontend, but PayloadCMS is my go-to.

Static site with Jekyll?

Jekyll and other static site generators do not repo Wordpress any more than notepad repos MSWord

In one, multiple users can login, edit WYSIWYG, preview, add images, etc, all from one UI. You can access it from any browser including smart phones and tablets.

In the other, you get to instruct users on git, how to deal with merge conflicts, code review (two people can't easily work on a post like they can in wordpress), previews require a manual build, you need a local checkout and local build installation to do the build. There no WYSIWYG, adding images is a manual process of copying a file, figuring out the URL, etc... No smartphone/tablet support. etc....

I switched by blog from wordpress install to a static site geneator because I got tired of having to keep it up to date but my posting dropped because of friction of posting went way up. I could no longer post from a phone. I couldn't easily add images. I had to build to preview. And had to submit via git commits and pushes. All of that meant what was easy became tedious.

Have you checked static site CMSes?

For example (not affiliated with them) https://www.siteleaf.com/

what are your favorite static site generators? I googled it and cloudflare article came up with Jekyll,Gatsby,Hugo,Next.js, Eleventy. But would like to avoid doing research if can be helped on pros/cons of each.

I looked recently when thinking of starting some new shared blog. My criteria was "based on tech I know". I don't know Ruby so Jekyll was out. I tried Eleventy and Hexo. I chose Hexo but then ultimately decided I wasn't going to do this new blog.

IIRC, Eleventy printed lots of out-of-date warnings when I installed it and/or the default style was broken in various ways which didn't give me much confidence.

My younger sister asked me to help her start a blog. I just pointed her to substack. Zero effort, easy for her.

I work with Ruby but I never had to use Ruby to use Jekyll. I downloaded the docker image and run it. It checks a host directory for updates and generates the HTML files. It could be written in any other language I don't know.

I don’t have much experience with other SSGs, but I’ve been using Eleventy for my personal site for a few years and I’m a big fan. It’s very simple to get started with, it’s fast to build, it’s powerful and flexible.

I build mine with GitHub Actions and host it free on Pages.

Jekyll and GitHub pages go together pretty well.

I've come to really appreciate Astro.js It's quite simple to get started, fairly intuitive for me, and very powerful.

Its sad software like citydesk died and did not evolve into multiuser applications.

Wiki software is the way to go here.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com