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I recently looked at Hugo[1] as a WP alternative and have been very impressed. It's a static website generator written in Go and features its own server with li

I recently looked at Hugo[1] as a WP alternative and have been very impressed. It's a static website generator written in Go and features its own server with live-reload so you can see changes to your content instantly in the browser. I was looking for something that a non-techie might be able to maintain and since Hugo offers prebuilt binaries the only requirements for the maintainer is to drop hugo.exe into the working directory and type a few commands. In the end though, it's still a bit more complicated for non-techies than maintaining a website created via WordPress. [1] https://gohugo.io https://gohugo.io

PopeOfNope 11y ago
Considering some of the people I've made wordpress sites for couldn't even figure out the wordpress interface, command line anything is a no go for a large percentage of wordpress's intended audience.
- soared 11y ago
  Hell, FTP is a no go for most of wordpress's audience.
- e12e 11y ago
  Yeah, I'm sure it'd be possible to build on top of Hugo (or many other static site generators) to build something that might be usable for the typical wp customer - but afaik none of them are that out of the box. The most likely alternative I can think of is Ghost: https://ghost.org/ https://ghost.org/ But, I'm not sure how easy it is to customize along the lines that people expect from wp (Now, that could be considered a feature - but it also means it could be a hard sell to someone that just wants a wp site). If what is needed really is a static site (a "web site"/"homepage") -- I think netlifly looks quite promising: https://www.netlify.com/ https://www.netlify.com/
- nogridbag 11y ago
  Actually the command line interface wasn't the deal breaker for me. I was asked to help out creating a website for a tiny organization (< 10 people). Once I found out multiple people would need to collaborate and edit the website it basically eliminated Hugo as a possibility. I suppose they could sync files via Dropbox but as I'm not a dropbox user myself I have no idea how it handles merges. Git is not really a possibility for obvious reasons. Finally, deployment is the final hurdle. If they wanted to edit a sentence on a WordPress site it's very easy. But with something like Hugo it would be a 3 step process: Edit the file. Build the website. Deploy to your web host.
gaius 11y ago
That you need to know or care about what programming language it's written in, rules it out for 99% of the web's users.
- nogridbag 11y ago
  Not sure what you meant by that. I mentioned it was written in Go for the HN crowd. You do not need to know Go to use it. I've never written a Go program in my life and followed the tutorial without any issues.
jacquesm 11y ago
Another vote for Hugo, it's lightning fast on the generation side and the support is amazing. I came across a subtle bug in the generator and within a day or two there was a fix in the works.

PopeOfNope 11y ago

Considering some of the people I've made wordpress sites for couldn't even figure out the wordpress interface, command line anything is a no go for a large percentage of wordpress's intended audience.

soared 11y ago
Hell, FTP is a no go for most of wordpress's audience.
e12e 11y ago
Yeah, I'm sure it'd be possible to build on top of Hugo (or many other static site generators) to build something that might be usable for the typical wp customer - but afaik none of them are that out of the box. The most likely alternative I can think of is Ghost: https://ghost.org/ https://ghost.org/ But, I'm not sure how easy it is to customize along the lines that people expect from wp (Now, that could be considered a feature - but it also means it could be a hard sell to someone that just wants a wp site). If what is needed really is a static site (a "web site"/"homepage") -- I think netlifly looks quite promising: https://www.netlify.com/ https://www.netlify.com/
nogridbag 11y ago
Actually the command line interface wasn't the deal breaker for me. I was asked to help out creating a website for a tiny organization (< 10 people). Once I found out multiple people would need to collaborate and edit the website it basically eliminated Hugo as a possibility. I suppose they could sync files via Dropbox but as I'm not a dropbox user myself I have no idea how it handles merges. Git is not really a possibility for obvious reasons. Finally, deployment is the final hurdle. If they wanted to edit a sentence on a WordPress site it's very easy. But with something like Hugo it would be a 3 step process: Edit the file. Build the website. Deploy to your web host.

gaius 11y ago

That you need to know or care about what programming language it's written in, rules it out for 99% of the web's users.

nogridbag 11y ago
Not sure what you meant by that. I mentioned it was written in Go for the HN crowd. You do not need to know Go to use it. I've never written a Go program in my life and followed the tutorial without any issues.

jacquesm 11y ago

Another vote for Hugo, it's lightning fast on the generation side and the support is amazing. I came across a subtle bug in the generator and within a day or two there was a fix in the works.