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Ask HN: Most Sites Don't Use a CMS Like Wordpress – What Non-CMS Do You Use?
Just noticed that about 57% of websites don't use a CMS like Wordpress/Drupal/etc. [1] If you don't use a CMS, what do you use exactly? I use github to host static sites, and things like Heroku for web apps.
[1]: https://w3techs.com/
- lando2319 10y agoI'm on Jekyll. I started out as a WordPress developer, so once I moved to more advanced programming I kept using WordPress, but it was so annoying to have to keep up with the updates that I decided to try Jekyll because of their static site nature. Static sites are awesome because they're wicked fast, and they work in perpetuity. I'm a huge fan. If you can handle a little coding I think it's much preferable to a CMS.
- jkereako 10y agoI too used to be a WordPress developer and then discovered Jekyll in the spring of 2015. I've been proselytizing static site generators ever since.
- thenomad 10y agoJust about to transition most or all of my Wordpress sites to static generate sites, probably using Hugo. I love static sites. They load incredibly fast, they're extremely cheap to run, the security hassles go way down and, as another commenter mentioned, they work for the long-term. And these days there are plenty of solutions for reader feedback that don't require you to run a Wordpress instance.
- sheraz 10y agoProcesswire (http://processwire.com http://processwire.com) is the darkhorse in the CMS race. Like Wordpress, it is also PHP/MySQL based. However, the ease of use, documentation, and extensibility has really won me over. I think the difference between Processwire and Wordpress has been in the developer experience. The former (Processwire) is better organized, direct, and addresses the most common things you would want to do in the CMS. Wordpress docs just feel like an afterthought and more of an index of things. yeah, i'm a big fan.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- rekado 10y agoI generate my static website with Haunt: https://haunt.dthompson.us/ https://haunt.dthompson.us/
- anotheryou 10y agoLas time I used grav for something that does not have to be client friendly. It still felt a bit immature though. (the pretty flat-file markdown quickly gets gobbled up in the YAML headers and than they can only be edited through the admin interface)
- tenken 10y agoLately the admin plugin has an Advanced view that exposes the full yaml file in a form...
- anotheryou 10y agoI still miss my vim and editing the synced raw files on my mobile... Both next to impossible with escaped markdown. I guess markdown keeps the syntax clean for a WYSIWYG editor too, but the real benefit always was that you could write it in plain text with any editor you want.
- xjconlyme 10y agoI use Strikingly https://www.strikingly.com https://www.strikingly.com to quickly set up personal/business sites for my friends and make some show case single page sites for my projects.
- sbierwagen 10y agoI've been using Nanoblogger, a Bash-based static website generator, for about ten years. It hasn't been updated in the last four, and indeed is still hosted on SourceForge. I could switch to something newer and better, but why bother?
- OJFord 10y ago> I could switch to something newer and better, but why bother? Since it's not maintained, personally I'd be tempted to try transitioning to something that is (with minimal change to content and structure/configuration required) to save dealing with it when you're just trying to publish new content and suddenly run up against some bug.
- mbrock 10y agoOTOH, if it's worked fine for ten years, the risk of headaches seems lower than anything else. And for any given static site generator, there's a pretty high risk it will be more or less unmaintained two years from now...
- erikb 10y agoSecurity updates for instance.
- SuperPaintMan 10y ago>static Interested if/how this could be exploited
- sho 10y agoMaybe it's a failure of imagination but I'm struggling to think of how a static site generator could need a security update?
- erikb 10y agoThe basic problem of security: They just need to find one attack path. You need to defend all, even the ones you don't know.
- floatboth 10y agoFor my personal website, I wrote a backend in Haskell: https://github.com/myfreeweb/sweetroll https://github.com/myfreeweb/sweetroll after trying a lot of static generators, writing Dropbox-backed blog engines, etc. It uses the Micropub protocol for posting/editing/deleting (I also made a frontend editor app for Micropub: https://github.com/myfreeweb/micro-panel https://github.com/myfreeweb/micro-panel), Webmention for talking to other websites, Git+JSON to store content. I don't like the PHP/MySQL CMS world at all, but I use that at work. We use MODX Revolution (with some sites still on Evolution).
- codygman 10y agoFirstly, sweetroll looks amazingly cool and being able to add javascript plugins seems like a great idea. Second, have you looked at clckwrks[0]? It aims to specifically dethrone wordpress by making plugins that are provably safe. I think this is a viable way to attack wordpresses stronghold, though I think being able to do things like write plugins based in javascript or other popular languages when an existing provably safe plugin doesn't exist will also be necessary. Last time I tried clckwrks it was a bit hard to get setup (this was pre-stack) so I don't blame you for rolling your own solution. I do wonder what you think of clckwrks and the idea of exploiting Haskell to make provably safe plugins so you can create a large ecosystem without the security issues that wordpress plugins have.
- tome 10y ago[0] http://www.clckwrks.com/page/view-page-slug/1/clckwrks-com http://www.clckwrks.com/page/view-page-slug/1/clckwrks-com
- codygman 10y agoThanks!
- floatboth 10y agoI have kinda looked at it — it's not really what I wanted. For my personal website, I don't want an admin interface, password authentication and all that CMS-y stuff. Also, sweetroll was my "learning haskell" project, so of course I had to write a whole backend from scratch! Setup wasn't the problem, Cabal sandboxes weren't much harder to use than stack… The actual benefit of stack is sharing compiled packages across all sandboxes instead of rebuilding everything every time. Plugins in Haskell, or any compiled language, are kinda awkward to work with honestly. If you have to recompile the app, it's not very pluginy :D What are the other options? Dynamically loading shared libraries or using standalone RPC processes, neither of which feels good for a web app. Embedded interpreters like duktape are pretty safe already. In terms of security model (you only expose what you want, there's nothing like file I/O available by default). Of course there might be bugs in them, especially memory bugs since they're written in C, but I'm not very concerned about actively hostile plugins tbh.
- kilian 10y agoUsually, I develop using https://harpjs.com/ https://harpjs.com/ because it's literally zero-configuration and does a ton (seriously, "harp server" and you get sass/less, ejs/jade/markdown and more), then compile to flat html, css and javascript.
- hashtagMERKY 10y agoI'm loving Jekyll. I've been building a blog with it and it's been a joy so far. I also have a 'main site' (just links to my social media and a little 'about me'), which I made using old-fashioned hand-written HTML and CSS. When I started on that I was a total noob, and now I have to update and maintain it, I understand the error of my ways. I'll probably switch to Jekyll for that too. At the moment I'm hosting everything on Netlify.
- CommanderData 10y agoUsing Grav for product documentation section. Was looking for something to generate html files initially. But Grav had a docs theme like rtd. So far it's running without a hitch. I've moved it a few times because its flat file, would recommend it.
- dmerfield 10y agoI use https://blot.im https://blot.im because it has no publishing interface and because I built the platform myself.
- rcdmd 10y agoPhenomic (https://phenomic.io/ https://phenomic.io/). It's a static-site-generator built on React. Formerly, I used a homegrown solution, also built on React.
- peller 10y agoHave you looked into Gatsby by chance? It's another Webpack/React static site generator. I'd be curious how they compare. https://github.com/gatsbyjs/gatsby https://github.com/gatsbyjs/gatsby
- kijin 10y agoA single file named `index.php` that loads a bunch of text files and spits out what looks vaguely like a blog. It's a total mess. Business logic and HTML snippets scattered everywhere. Layers of caching to make the whole thing load in less than 0.03 seconds on cheap shared hosting. I'm sure I do a much better job for paying clients, but somehow never get around to fixing the decade-old garbage that runs my own site. At least it doesn't have any SQL injection vulnerabilities :p
- cdevs 10y agoCould still be if file_exist then read file despite where or what file , it's the 2nd most common security hole I have seen behind sql injection.
- kijin 10y agoThe script just preloads every file in a hard-coded directory into an associative array and uses isset() to check if the requested post exists. So no arbitrary file access, either.
- douche 10y agoA hackjob of an ASP.NET MVC app that loads html pages from Azure blob storage, hosted on the cheapest tier of Azure WebApps that lets you use a real domain name.
- andreapaiola 10y agoHtml and php include
- erikb 10y agoYou still need at least a webserver with cgi support.
- andreapaiola 10y agoLAMP is the standard on my servers
- andreapaiola 10y agoGulp
- andreapaiola 10y agoGulp
- taprun 10y agoI coded my site in PHP.
- crgwbr 10y agoReST files and Sphinx
- proyb2 10y agoGithub to host static page because CSS Flexbox and HTML are so easy and will be well supported in 2017. I use Swift Sever Side framework for backend and Sveltejs (https://Svelte.technology https://Svelte.technology) for front-end JavaScript to handle just about anything that jQuery could and a lot easier to run same compiled modules code on Nodejs and web browsers with Rollup. Less worry than running frameworks that will encounter bugs that may take time to resolve e.g. React, Angular 1/2 have enormous issues since 2014/2013, Swift and Sveltejs are a great combination. I roll, I roll, I roll out in 2017! Pssst. DOM are fastest when you only need to update a small portion of your code and majority of use case with DOM manipulation is fine.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- glinskik 10y agoI use middlemanapp.com and deploy to s3 with cloudfront and then use lambda/apigateway for the 2 backend operations I need.
- crisnoble 10y agoI would love to learn more about the lambda/apigateway part, I too need two backend operations on an otherwise static site, mailchimp signup and contact form submission. I am new to AWS, but I am pretty sure lambda could handle this, do you have suggestions on where I could learn more about setting something like this up?
- glinskik 10y agocontact form submission is the main use case for us. API gateway doesn't support form data so it will have to be an ajax post. Just found this blog which is the same use case I have https://codehabitude.com/2016/04/05/forms-to-emails-using-aws-lambda-api-gateway/ https://codehabitude.com/2016/04/05/forms-to-emails-using-aw...
- danieldk 10y agoI used Hakyll for some years, which is terrific. I got fed up with the long compile times, dependency problems, etc. So, I switched to Jekyll. I like it slightly less, but setting it up on new machines is a walk in the park.
- k4rtik 10y agoIf faster compile cycles are one of your primary requirements, you might like to try Hugo.
- Jugurtha 10y agoI'm toying with Google App Engine and writing a mini-CMS/ecommerce thing in Python. To create products, categories, and subcategories, you just create folders. A friend had difficulties with Wordpress + Woocommerce I set for them and I figured everyone knows folders. I'm tinkering with it from time to time. (As you might notice, I'm also learning web dev, CSS and stuff).. https://github.com/jhadjar/boutique https://github.com/jhadjar/boutique
- SuperPaintMan 10y agoI'm using IndExhibit [ http://www.indexhibit.org http://www.indexhibit.org ] a PHP CMS Thing from 2006. It's unsupported now but simple and viewed well in the design community. I host it staticly by wget-spidering it when I make a change. Only takes a few seconds to update my archive anyway. It's hacky, but the rest of my site uses AppEngine and I really don't feel like exposing a unsupported hack job of PHP to the open internet. Had a few issues that required modification to the themes, but that was the only issue ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ https://theblackbox.ca https://theblackbox.ca
- anhtran 10y agoI use Python (Django, Flask) for CRUD, APIs, general purposes (80% of my works); Golang for realtime, websocket; Scala (Play) if I need JVM environment.
- cmac2992 10y agoKeystone.js Its basically a node/express app with a nice backend. I really enjoy it, incredibly flexible. I've even used it without a front end as internal CRM.
- nils-m-holm 10y agoI'm using vi. And a couple of shell scripts and Scheme programs to convert source code to html.
- hunvreus 10y agoI switched to Jekyll about 6 years ago. If your site has a lot of content, you'll have to use a few tricks to retain fast builds [1]. We had to build a lightweight CMS[2] for regular folks to update content, and a pro hosting alternative to GitHub pages that supports multiple branches, authentication, redirections, proxying... We're Open Sourcing the CMS part; shoot me an email if you use Jekyll and are interested in testing it out. [1]: https://wiredcraft.com/blog/make-jekyll-fast/ https://wiredcraft.com/blog/make-jekyll-fast/ [2]: https://i.imgur.com/4rkHKhY.png https://i.imgur.com/4rkHKhY.png
- stevenhubertron 10y agoContentful + Jekyll + Netlify for me.
- iamben 10y agoSome good answers here. Interestingly (for me), I've started going back to building more or less static sites for clients. I used Wordpress for a long time, but have increasingly found none of them want to blog, and few of them update either the site (or Wordpress, which can end up a security nightmare). Often when it came to updating pages, they would call or email and say "can you do XXX", to which I'd reply "I can, but so can you". 90% of the time they're more than happy to pay me to update a page in Wordpress, which I could have done just as easily / quickly in a static site. Long and short, the overhead of building a custom theme and setting up Wordpress isn't worth it for most clients, and even less me in a cost/time for the money way.
- mmsimanga 10y agoI am going through a similar transition. Moving my ten odd Drupal sites I built for family and friends to Hugo. In other cases just plain HTML using WinHttrack to download HTML version of site as is. I will convert to Hugo if need arises. Only one user from the 10 ever used the CMS functionality to modify her site. She did it the one year, totally forgot her password and the following year asked me to make the changes. Maintenance of a CMS is even more of a struggle if that isn't your core job. If I worked on Drupal for my day job I wouldn't leaving the sites on Drupal.
- danesparza 10y agoI went from Wordpress -> Jekyll -> Hugo. I love Hugo because it's a single binary, it's fast as hell when generating a static site, and it's easy to understand (and got great docs). After I generate a static site, it's hosted on S3 (with a Cloudflare caching layer). The whole thing costs me pennies a month.
- kowdermeister 10y agoThis 57% sounds horribly wrong. They don't really explain how they come to this conclusion here: https://w3techs.com/technologies https://w3techs.com/technologies My gut feeling is that 57% is a huge number if you assume that they don't use a CMS. I don't think that's manageable by the average owner with static site generators. None of my clients would be able to update their site with GIT + text editors. It's more likely that there's some kind of backend system that the survey was unable to identify.
- ohyoutravel 10y agoThis is kind of what got me. I feel like the majority of people wouldn't be savvy enough to do a site without a CMS as the setup is a little involved, or at least more involved than the simplicity of going to Wordpress.com and starting a site. So I don't know if I'm just missing something major here, or if the data is off.
- michaelbuckbee 10y agoWell, that's 57% that they could identify and that they happened to classify that way. There are lots of ways to obscure what's running and many more platforms out there.
- OberstKrueger 10y agoAt the moment, I use Caddy's built-in Markdown and template features [1], and simply rsync a bunch of markdown files to my server. It's basic, and certainly not as performant as hosting out static files, but it works well enough for my low-traffic site. [1]: https://caddyserver.com/docs/markdown https://caddyserver.com/docs/markdown
- Panino 10y agovi, zopfli, gimp, optipng, jpegtran, rsync over ssh
- Rabidgremlin 10y agoHugo and S3 buckets. Have a Docker image that does the builds and deploys. All triggered on git push using Bitbucket Pipelines https://github.com/rabidgremlin/hugo-s3 https://github.com/rabidgremlin/hugo-s3
- cauterized 10y agoI wonder what percentage of websites created by non-technical people are hosted using SaaS that's technically a CMS but isn't standalone -- e.g. Squarespace or Blogspot or Google Sites?
- Tharre 10y agoVoid[0], vim, git and ssh do the job for me. [0] https://github.com/josephernest/void https://github.com/josephernest/void
- mbrock 10y agoI kind of like to use XSLT and xsltproc.
- scot_hacker 10y agoGiven all this recent love for static site generators, it's kind of amazing/sad that MovableType lost out to Wordpress - MT was a static site generator all along, and very sophisticated.
- marcoghe 10y agoI'm using a combination of Jekyll, DatoCms [http://www.datocms.com http://www.datocms.com] and Netlify.
- siphr 10y agoI switch from wordpress to Pelican. I did not have a particular issue with wordpress apart from the mentioned security hassles but I also found it to be a bit bloated for what I wanted. Now I have a much cleaner implementation in Pelican and I am liking it... alot! check it out @ https://techtum.eu https://techtum.eu