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Comment by bobfunk | Hacker News Reader

I think there's a big future for static site generators (that's why I'm building BitBalloon https://www.BitBalloon.com), but the big hurdle for using them for projects for clients is the lack of browser based admin tools.

Stuff like prose.io goes some of the way, but for most users even WordPress requires training, and showing them the raw filesystem is gonna be way to geeky in many cases.

Would love to talk to anyone interested in building a great open source admin panel for a static site generator.

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I've been thinking about leveraging existing open source interfaces for static site generation, creating something between a full cached (Varnish, etc) interface to a dynamic site and generating each page on the fly. So rather than have Wordpress or Drupal or some such thing generate the full site the new post is dumped into the existing static site generator and a site generation pass is triggered.

I'd prefer to retain some dynamic site features like commenting, discussion, and form submission. While there are very successful companies that outsource these features I prefer to have the option to take ownership and control of my content. So I'm envisioning the only dynamic part of the site besides the admin interface is an API to enable these (and more) features. Depending on design and the type of interaction these could trigger a page or site rebuild or update a Javascript framework on the page to reflect the new comment, the successful form posting that updates a calendar, etc.

I wrote a project proposal back in 2010 for something like this. Essentially the key is to turn site updates from being GET-driven to being PUSH-driven.

I put together a sort-of static site generator for my own purposes called, originally enough, "sites"[1]. It is really just a front-end for GitHub's open source git-backed wiki system, but it works well.

[1]: https://github.com/peterkeen/sites

Bob, we should talk! https://github.com/silentrob/harp-editor

I'm working on a Admin/CMS Editor for Harp http://harpjs.com

MIT, Open source of course.

https://code.google.com/p/tortoisegit/

Still too complicated for non-geeks.

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