5 ms·

Squarespace Announces Local Development Server

113 points by lepht 10y ago

everlost 10y ago
I had been using an open source variant of this the last few months, which ironically has a similar approach - https://github.com/NodeSquarespace/node-squarespace-server https://github.com/NodeSquarespace/node-squarespace-server This is amazing news though! Hoping the next step is to expose a content manipulation api :)
- jasonbarone 10y ago
  Same here. This was built by an outstanding outside dev who was using all sorts of undocumented methods to extract content and render a Squarespace template. That server has been awesome, but in order for it to continue to work the project dev had to maintain a JavaScript recreation of Squarespace's templating engine. This new dev server seems to run the same engine they use in the development environment. It works insanely well, even with some of the most complex stuff I've throw at it.
jc4p 10y ago
This is insanely cool. No matter how useful/easy your web GUI is, if you have the skill set it's always easier to just do it by hand. Huge congrats to Squarespace, I've already linked this to friends I know that use them and have had customization issues in the past. This is a great opportunity for those who have tried to teach themselves web basics before to actually add stuff to their own sites and really expand their skillset. I've been working on my own thing similar to this for HubSpot, having to edit using a clunky CMS live in production is super scary. I really would like to live in a world where most "we make X easier to do" companies release things like this to let people who know how to do it by hand do it faster.
- marktangotango 10y ago
  This is also why I built https://www.lite-engine.com https://www.lite-engine.com to give people with some technical know how a platform to build database driven webapps. And we offer free ssl on custom domains via Let's Encrypt. I'll have examples coming in a few weeks about how to implement blog comment systems, and payment integration.
icpmacdo 10y ago
They need to compete with AWS Lambda / parse next I think. It would be an easy platform for junior javascript dev's to get up and going with a nice looking website that has a backend they can control.
sashagim 10y ago
A bit off topic, but if someone from Squarespace can comment - any plans to add an app market?
gogopuppygogo 10y ago
Next up an open source version that lets us host our own version without being trapped in their environment. Once that exists I'd see Squarespace as a viable option for hosting a website. Until then it's just another proprietary WYSIWYG website builder that I don't care about. It's competing in a world where Wordpress is open source and is powering over 26% of the world's websites: https://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/content_management/all https://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/content_management...
- JaggedJax 10y ago
  Squarespace is way too locked down. They advertise it as a great eCommerce platform and people come to us all the time already having setup a Squarespace store asking if we can pull their orders for fulfillment. It either has to be done manually or they force you to use ShipStation. Terribly inflexible for a webstore and I always steer people away as soon as possible. But hey, they got that sweet sweet exclusivity agreement so who actually cares about usability or the paying customer, right?
  - dsugarman 10y ago
    I don't see any benefit of having an exclusive, ShipStation wants Squarespace as much as Sqaurespace wants ShipStation
    - jasonbarone 10y ago
      Squarespace typically integrates with best-in-class services for optimal onboarding, setup and UX. ShipStation is best in class for fulfillment, which is why I think they partnered with them. But I agree with some of the comments. The restricted API kills all workflow-related processes. Regardless of shipping and fulfillment, there's tons of business processes that need to be done with orders and you can't do any of it with Squarespace. I've worked with dozens of clients who started on Squarespace and moved to other platforms simply because of Commerce restrictions.
    - JaggedJax 10y ago
matrix 10y ago
Squarespace is awesome, but until they offer SSL certificates I can't recommend it to anyone. This is very unfortunate because it's a great product otherwise.
- jasonbarone 10y ago
  Founder/CEO Anthony Casalena mentioned on an interview with TNW (http://thenextweb.com/insider/2016/04/15/squarespace-now-lets-purchase-domain-straight-site/#gref http://thenextweb.com/insider/2016/04/15/squarespace-now-let...) that free SSL would be coming soon to Squarespace customers by way of their new Domains service. Cloudflare SSL can be used with Squarespace as an alternative. Everything Squarespace does underneath is over https already
- arc 10y ago
  It's coming! I've personally wanted seamless SSL for all Squarespace customers on custom domains for forever now, and we've put a lot of work into making it a reality. Furthermore, before initiatives like Let's Encrypt, the business/logistics side of getting this in place was a mess. (Disclosure: I'm the founder/CEO of Squarespace)
  - ghawkescs 10y ago
    This is great! I really like Squarespace but this is one of the big features I have been waiting on. The other one is integrated A/B testing, or at least an easy way to work with A/B testing frameworks. Are there any plans to support this?
- didgeoridoo 10y ago
  Not "seamless", but if you set up a VPS as a reverse proxy to your site with NGINX and Certbot, you can get Let's Encrypt running with Squarespace today. Doesn't require a huge amount of technical know-how; it was only the second SSL cert I'd ever installed. If anyone is interested in detailed instructions, shoot me an email.
akhilcacharya 10y ago
Using NPM to distribute a Java application? ...interesting.
koolba 10y ago
> The first time you access a local template, it will take a while to load as the server fetches the site content. However, once the content has been cached, subsequent requests will complete more quickly until you terminate the server. If you need to invalidate the cache (because you’ve updated your website in the online editor, for example) you can use the ?nocache=true query parameter on any URL. Why would a developer want to see a cached version of a page? A developer using this is actively developing the look and feel of the site so presumably would want to see the live version. This makes no sense and would only cause issues ("But it looked fine when I tested it locally a minute ago?!"). > The Development Server is built with Java using the Dropwizard framework. It takes advantage of our open-sourced JSON-T compiler and Less compiler. It’s packaged and distributed over NPM using a set of install scripts that detect the target platform and ensure Java is configured correctly. It’s built to be cross-platform, so Windows, Linux, and Mac developers can all take advantage of the efficiencies the Dev Server provides. If this is really targeted for developers why not just make it a portable executable for each platform (rather than requiring a node install to just fetch the server)? Alternatively, npm should install pip, use that to install cpan, use that to install gem, use that to install docker, and finally load the server from a container (which does the same series of npm/pip/cpan/gem installers run on Ubuntu 16.04 and then downloads a binary tarball of the app).
- jc4p 10y ago
  I'm not a 100% sure but when I've used similar tools like this before the cached data coming from the web is the _content_ of the page, where the checked out repo I'm in is dealing with the _layout_ of the page. Do you really need the contents of the newest blog posts to be pulled in each time you want to test a CSS layout change?
  - koolba 10y ago
    > I'm not a 100% sure but when I've used similar tools like this before the cached data coming from the web is the _content_ of the page, where the checked out repo I'm in is dealing with the _layout_ of the page. Is this rendering the page remotely and fetching it? If so, it seems like the only point would be to reduce the server load on their end. > Do you really need the contents of the newest blog posts to be pulled in each time you want to test a CSS layout change? You would need something. At the minimum a "Lorem ipsum ..." to see how the text flows. What better than the real content for that? Especially if you already have it.
littleblackbear 10y ago
holy crap. i threw my vote at this request three years ago, and then gave up on squarespace. i have no idea how they managed to be, or appeared to be, a "developer-friendly" platform without it.
kkotak 10y ago
HN Needs to have a way to mark a post as - Marketing.
- koolba 10y ago
  Would save bytes to instead mark those that aren't.
mcescalante 10y ago
I'm mainly wary of Squarespace because their entire frontend compiles to YUI which stopped being maintained in August, 2014 (see https://yahooeng.tumblr.com/post/96098168666/important-announcement-regarding-yui https://yahooeng.tumblr.com/post/96098168666/important-annou...). You don't write YUI, but that's what the code ends up as when you visit the site. I tried out their developer platform early after they launched it, and trying to be productive with it put my brain in a pretzel. I feel as though the SS CMS is overpriced for the features you get, and you're locked into their tech stack & templating which I find leave something to be desired. You can use Wordpress as a CMS and use the API to get the data yourself, or just compile the site to static for free with a plugin, not to mention the large number of paid pluggable CMS solutions for developers. The list goes on, but a local development server shouldn't be this big of news for a CMS developer platform.
- jasonbarone 10y ago
  That isn't entirely correct. You can use Squarespace on the front end 100% YUI-free if you want. I haven't used one line of YUI in years and I work exclusively with Squarespace. Some of Squarespace's internal features are powered by YUI and accessible via misc callbacks, but if you're building custom websites you don't have to use any of it.
- colevscode 10y ago
  Hi, I work on the Squarespace dev platform. It's true that certain blocks still use YUI, but this is system functionality that's not part of our public API. In new templates, a Squarespace developer won't see or touch YUI code. We're no longer creating new features with YUI. We write new frontend editor functionality with modern libraries like React.
dabernathy89 10y ago
Very cool. Would love for Shopify to do something similar. These full-featured, hosted CMSs - NationBuilder, Shopify, Hubspot, SquareSpace - offer a lot of neat features, but the development experience ranges from slightly frustrating to plain old miserable.
- drsim 10y ago
  I haven't found that to be the case for Shopify. Our theme is in git and each developer has their own development shop (hosted by Shopify for free). Using the Shopify theme tool, changes in the local file system are automatically published to their development shop. The experience is the same as if you were running a local instance. Production deployment is simply having a different folder mapped to master and watched by the theme tool too.
  - dabernathy89 10y ago
    > changes in the local file system are automatically published to their development shop in my experience this has been really annoying. changes can be pushed up nearly instantly, or sometimes they can take more than 5 seconds. this makes livereload unreliable.
shaqbert 10y ago
How can Squarespace even exist in a world that Wordpress supposedly had won? The answer is by winning over the average Joe, who is not a developer or webmaster. I don't get how wordpress.com never became something more attuned to the needs of average Joe...
akshatpradhan 10y ago
Why does Squarespace insist that we code up our tables?

113 points by lepht 10y ago

I had been using an open source variant of this the last few months, which ironically has a similar approach - https://github.com/NodeSquarespace/node-squarespace-server https://github.com/NodeSquarespace/node-squarespace-server This is amazing news though! Hoping the next step is to expose a content manipulation api :)

jasonbarone 10y ago
Same here. This was built by an outstanding outside dev who was using all sorts of undocumented methods to extract content and render a Squarespace template. That server has been awesome, but in order for it to continue to work the project dev had to maintain a JavaScript recreation of Squarespace's templating engine. This new dev server seems to run the same engine they use in the development environment. It works insanely well, even with some of the most complex stuff I've throw at it.

jc4p 10y ago

This is insanely cool. No matter how useful/easy your web GUI is, if you have the skill set it's always easier to just do it by hand. Huge congrats to Squarespace, I've already linked this to friends I know that use them and have had customization issues in the past. This is a great opportunity for those who have tried to teach themselves web basics before to actually add stuff to their own sites and really expand their skillset. I've been working on my own thing similar to this for HubSpot, having to edit using a clunky CMS live in production is super scary. I really would like to live in a world where most "we make X easier to do" companies release things like this to let people who know how to do it by hand do it faster.

marktangotango 10y ago
This is also why I built https://www.lite-engine.com https://www.lite-engine.com to give people with some technical know how a platform to build database driven webapps. And we offer free ssl on custom domains via Let's Encrypt. I'll have examples coming in a few weeks about how to implement blog comment systems, and payment integration.

icpmacdo 10y ago

They need to compete with AWS Lambda / parse next I think. It would be an easy platform for junior javascript dev's to get up and going with a nice looking website that has a backend they can control.

sashagim 10y ago

A bit off topic, but if someone from Squarespace can comment - any plans to add an app market?

gogopuppygogo 10y ago

Next up an open source version that lets us host our own version without being trapped in their environment. Once that exists I'd see Squarespace as a viable option for hosting a website. Until then it's just another proprietary WYSIWYG website builder that I don't care about. It's competing in a world where Wordpress is open source and is powering over 26% of the world's websites: https://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/content_management/all https://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/content_management...

JaggedJax 10y ago
Squarespace is way too locked down. They advertise it as a great eCommerce platform and people come to us all the time already having setup a Squarespace store asking if we can pull their orders for fulfillment. It either has to be done manually or they force you to use ShipStation. Terribly inflexible for a webstore and I always steer people away as soon as possible. But hey, they got that sweet sweet exclusivity agreement so who actually cares about usability or the paying customer, right?
- dsugarman 10y ago
  I don't see any benefit of having an exclusive, ShipStation wants Squarespace as much as Sqaurespace wants ShipStation
  - jasonbarone 10y ago
    Squarespace typically integrates with best-in-class services for optimal onboarding, setup and UX. ShipStation is best in class for fulfillment, which is why I think they partnered with them. But I agree with some of the comments. The restricted API kills all workflow-related processes. Regardless of shipping and fulfillment, there's tons of business processes that need to be done with orders and you can't do any of it with Squarespace. I've worked with dozens of clients who started on Squarespace and moved to other platforms simply because of Commerce restrictions.
  - JaggedJax 10y ago

matrix 10y ago

Squarespace is awesome, but until they offer SSL certificates I can't recommend it to anyone. This is very unfortunate because it's a great product otherwise.

jasonbarone 10y ago
Founder/CEO Anthony Casalena mentioned on an interview with TNW (http://thenextweb.com/insider/2016/04/15/squarespace-now-lets-purchase-domain-straight-site/#gref http://thenextweb.com/insider/2016/04/15/squarespace-now-let...) that free SSL would be coming soon to Squarespace customers by way of their new Domains service. Cloudflare SSL can be used with Squarespace as an alternative. Everything Squarespace does underneath is over https already
arc 10y ago
It's coming! I've personally wanted seamless SSL for all Squarespace customers on custom domains for forever now, and we've put a lot of work into making it a reality. Furthermore, before initiatives like Let's Encrypt, the business/logistics side of getting this in place was a mess. (Disclosure: I'm the founder/CEO of Squarespace)
- ghawkescs 10y ago
  This is great! I really like Squarespace but this is one of the big features I have been waiting on. The other one is integrated A/B testing, or at least an easy way to work with A/B testing frameworks. Are there any plans to support this?
didgeoridoo 10y ago
Not "seamless", but if you set up a VPS as a reverse proxy to your site with NGINX and Certbot, you can get Let's Encrypt running with Squarespace today. Doesn't require a huge amount of technical know-how; it was only the second SSL cert I'd ever installed. If anyone is interested in detailed instructions, shoot me an email.

akhilcacharya 10y ago

Using NPM to distribute a Java application? ...interesting.

koolba 10y ago

> The first time you access a local template, it will take a while to load as the server fetches the site content. However, once the content has been cached, subsequent requests will complete more quickly until you terminate the server. If you need to invalidate the cache (because you’ve updated your website in the online editor, for example) you can use the ?nocache=true query parameter on any URL. Why would a developer want to see a cached version of a page? A developer using this is actively developing the look and feel of the site so presumably would want to see the live version. This makes no sense and would only cause issues ("But it looked fine when I tested it locally a minute ago?!"). > The Development Server is built with Java using the Dropwizard framework. It takes advantage of our open-sourced JSON-T compiler and Less compiler. It’s packaged and distributed over NPM using a set of install scripts that detect the target platform and ensure Java is configured correctly. It’s built to be cross-platform, so Windows, Linux, and Mac developers can all take advantage of the efficiencies the Dev Server provides. If this is really targeted for developers why not just make it a portable executable for each platform (rather than requiring a node install to just fetch the server)? Alternatively, npm should install pip, use that to install cpan, use that to install gem, use that to install docker, and finally load the server from a container (which does the same series of npm/pip/cpan/gem installers run on Ubuntu 16.04 and then downloads a binary tarball of the app).

jc4p 10y ago
I'm not a 100% sure but when I've used similar tools like this before the cached data coming from the web is the _content_ of the page, where the checked out repo I'm in is dealing with the _layout_ of the page. Do you really need the contents of the newest blog posts to be pulled in each time you want to test a CSS layout change?
- koolba 10y ago
  > I'm not a 100% sure but when I've used similar tools like this before the cached data coming from the web is the _content_ of the page, where the checked out repo I'm in is dealing with the _layout_ of the page. Is this rendering the page remotely and fetching it? If so, it seems like the only point would be to reduce the server load on their end. > Do you really need the contents of the newest blog posts to be pulled in each time you want to test a CSS layout change? You would need something. At the minimum a "Lorem ipsum ..." to see how the text flows. What better than the real content for that? Especially if you already have it.

littleblackbear 10y ago

holy crap. i threw my vote at this request three years ago, and then gave up on squarespace. i have no idea how they managed to be, or appeared to be, a "developer-friendly" platform without it.

kkotak 10y ago

HN Needs to have a way to mark a post as - Marketing.

koolba 10y ago
Would save bytes to instead mark those that aren't.

mcescalante 10y ago

I'm mainly wary of Squarespace because their entire frontend compiles to YUI which stopped being maintained in August, 2014 (see https://yahooeng.tumblr.com/post/96098168666/important-announcement-regarding-yui https://yahooeng.tumblr.com/post/96098168666/important-annou...). You don't write YUI, but that's what the code ends up as when you visit the site. I tried out their developer platform early after they launched it, and trying to be productive with it put my brain in a pretzel. I feel as though the SS CMS is overpriced for the features you get, and you're locked into their tech stack & templating which I find leave something to be desired. You can use Wordpress as a CMS and use the API to get the data yourself, or just compile the site to static for free with a plugin, not to mention the large number of paid pluggable CMS solutions for developers. The list goes on, but a local development server shouldn't be this big of news for a CMS developer platform.

jasonbarone 10y ago
That isn't entirely correct. You can use Squarespace on the front end 100% YUI-free if you want. I haven't used one line of YUI in years and I work exclusively with Squarespace. Some of Squarespace's internal features are powered by YUI and accessible via misc callbacks, but if you're building custom websites you don't have to use any of it.
colevscode 10y ago
Hi, I work on the Squarespace dev platform. It's true that certain blocks still use YUI, but this is system functionality that's not part of our public API. In new templates, a Squarespace developer won't see or touch YUI code. We're no longer creating new features with YUI. We write new frontend editor functionality with modern libraries like React.

dabernathy89 10y ago

Very cool. Would love for Shopify to do something similar. These full-featured, hosted CMSs - NationBuilder, Shopify, Hubspot, SquareSpace - offer a lot of neat features, but the development experience ranges from slightly frustrating to plain old miserable.

drsim 10y ago
I haven't found that to be the case for Shopify. Our theme is in git and each developer has their own development shop (hosted by Shopify for free). Using the Shopify theme tool, changes in the local file system are automatically published to their development shop. The experience is the same as if you were running a local instance. Production deployment is simply having a different folder mapped to master and watched by the theme tool too.
- dabernathy89 10y ago
  > changes in the local file system are automatically published to their development shop in my experience this has been really annoying. changes can be pushed up nearly instantly, or sometimes they can take more than 5 seconds. this makes livereload unreliable.

shaqbert 10y ago

How can Squarespace even exist in a world that Wordpress supposedly had won? The answer is by winning over the average Joe, who is not a developer or webmaster. I don't get how wordpress.com never became something more attuned to the needs of average Joe...

akshatpradhan 10y ago

Why does Squarespace insist that we code up our tables?