19 ms·

Ask HN: Excluding WordPress, what is your favorite for blogs or small stores?

339 points by travisby 10y ago

marwann 10y ago
I used to work a lot with Wordpress in the past, but as projects tend to be more and more specific, I found Middleman[1] more flexible and for structured content (eg. directories) or for generating pages automatically, using a YAML structure is very convenient. For my online shop, I use Shopify[2] as it is a side project and I did not want to spend a lot of time writing / setting it up. Shopify proves very convenient and includes a blog if needed. [1] Middleman - https://middlemanapp.com https://middlemanapp.com [2] Shopify - https://www.shopify.com https://www.shopify.com
dbg31415 10y ago
If you already think we're going to say WordPress, what do you want to do that WordPress doesn't do? I don't like WordPress for eCommerce, but I think it's great for blogs and content sites. For eCommerce... just too many variables. Who you want to use for fulfillment, what other systems you want to integrate with, if you need a staging instance or customer loyalty software or any of the 50 other things you can integrate. For content... Ghost is OK. Just... WordPress has thought of everything already. Plugins, solid UX, extra features you didn't know to ask for... it's hard for other platforms to catch up.
- weavie 10y ago
  For me, it is quite a shallow reason. I just don't enjoy developing in PHP. Wordpress is amazing at what it does, but I always dread having to touch it. There is nothing else that gets close to it (that I have found) in terms of ease of use for the users, which is why I keep having to return to it. I long for the day when someone writes something just as good in Haskell (hey, I can dream..).
  - dbg31415 10y ago
    You code so little with Word Press, there's an extension for like everything you own or do you already. It's more just configuration stuff, right? What are you trying to do with your new site?
    - weavie 10y ago
      I like to really understand what is going on under the hood. If I don't quite understand how something works I like to read the source code. Also sometimes a plugin doesn't quite do exactly what I want, or is so large and complex due to trying to cater for everyone that I just feel uneasy about using it and so for simple things I prefer to just write a little code that does exactly what I need and no more. Plus, I am a coder. And coders code so that's what I do. It's just a psychological thing...
  - codygman 10y ago
    In regards to WordPress in haskell, I wish for the same! I've been following clckwrks off and on for a few years, I wonder if it's secure plugin API was ever finished... https://github.com/clckwrks/clckwrks https://github.com/clckwrks/clckwrks Edit: https://github.com/clckwrks/web-plugins https://github.com/clckwrks/web-plugins
technion 10y ago
Things I hear CMS developers talking about: Constantly applying security updates. The lack of maintenance on their favourite plugins. Which caching plugins works the best. How important a CDN is. The need for security plugins, which themselves are often exploited. The HN/Reddit hug of death. Whether a host has suitable versions of PHP. "Webscale" being ten users a minute. I don't get it. I've been using a static site built in Jekyll, which just works(tm). I recently rebuilt my blog with AMP compliance, and it still looks the way I want it to. If you're not Ruby person, there's Hugo as a Go alternative. For blogs, we really should be seeing the end of maintenance, vulnerabilities, and static pages are cheaper to host. Edit: of course, I answered the blog question, but not the ecommerce one.
- danso 10y ago
  Worth noting that you don't have to be a Ruby person to effectively use Jekyll. Most of the dynamic features are implemented in the Liquid templating language -- I hardly ever touched any Ruby when dealing with Jekyll, especially if I were using it in conjunction with (typical) Github Pages, which whitelists Jekyll plugins and thus incentivizes sticking with the simple vanilla setup.
  - musikele 10y ago
    I'm not a ruby person but I use Jekyll for a lot of projects. What I can't do is write plugins, but you should really have strong custom requirements to need a plugin.
    - amorphid 10y ago
      I know Ruby, and was recently a business "can't write my own plug-ins" person. If you have a plug-in need that would be handy for you, feel free to ping me. For fun, I'll craft you a demo that incorporates what you'd need to know to write that plug-in yourself, with source code and a how-to Youtube video!
  - youngtaff 10y ago
    You don't have to be a Ruby person but it helps when your Ruby dependencies break, then your Jekyll blog won't build and you have no idea why! I tend to blow it all away and start again in this situation, when I've got time I intend to move away from Jekyll
bbcbasic 10y ago
Github pages. Free hosting. Just fork a Jekyll template and off you go.
bharani_m 10y ago
Ghost + Gumroad (selling products) would be a decent alternative. Other options are to go with static site generators like Middleman or Hugo for your blog and setting up a shop on Shopify or Sellfy. As a side note, I have open sourced the code [1] for my shop/blog that is running at https://www.authenticpixels.com https://www.authenticpixels.com. It is written in Elixir/Phoenix. [1] https://github.com/authentic-pixels/ex-shop https://github.com/authentic-pixels/ex-shop
- tomcam 10y ago
  Site runs very fast. Congratulations
  - bharani_m 10y ago
    Thanks! I have tried to reduce the JS & CSS being used on the page. I've only included the grid and navbar components from Bootstrap's CSS framework and there is pretty minimal JS involved. I have used Turbolinks to replace the <body> tag on each request via ajax.
- lfender6445 10y ago
  Ghost runs on express for those interested, so its very easy to extend if need be
danieldk 10y ago
Jekyll/Hakyll for blogs. They are both very customizable, you can write Markdown, and since they produce static pages you have one security worry less.
sgdesign 10y ago
If this is for a client that can't manage a static site themselves, then I would probably look into splitting out the content editing part. For example services like https://www.datocms.com/ https://www.datocms.com/ let you publish to a separate static site generator.
- thirdsun 10y ago
  I just discovered Dato when I was looking for a CMS for Middleman and it looks fantastic. Expensive, but it seems to be an excellent choice for client work.
milankragujevic 10y ago
Custom CMS in PHP. That's what I always use for everything.
altharaz 10y ago
It depends on your skills/needs. Do you want to customize everything with ease? Do you have someone who can maintain the security of your blog and eventually add new features later? => WordPress on your own hosting Do you want to use a very classical theme? Do you want a complete service with no skills required and no maintenance? => Wix or WordPress.com Do you want to customize everything? Do you have someone to maintain the blog on a regular base? => Jekyll on GitHub or on your own hosting Shall you need to sell things online with the blog, WordPress can be augmented with Shopify, meanwhile Wix has already this feature.
xiaoma 10y ago
Squarespace is the clear option. It's even faster to get set up with than WP and in the past 2 years has become a truly viable competitor.
- apapli 10y ago
  I really like Squarespace too, but just be wary if you have a site information architecture that needs to go beyond 1 level of menus. It doesn't handle sub-levels well. I'd also really appreciate it if they let you save a template page (eg for a landing page) for easy re-use. Re-creating specific landing pages and thank you pages for each campaign we run is a bit of a pain as what I really just want to do is change a few paragraphs of text and update an image or two for these.
  - deutronium 10y ago
    The lack of multiple levels of menus is something I noticed with Ghost too, when I last played with it. Also I'm wondering, with Squarespace, it's not clear whether you can install on your own server or not
    - nsp 10y ago
      You cannot self host square space.
iamslash 10y ago
I think jekyll is the best thing to blog something. And I recommend to hosting it on github for free.
mrswag 10y ago
I generate static webpages from markdown in a < 100 lines bash script. It's just a for loop using sed, pygments and markdown, hosted on github. It has a local webserver, spell check, optional image compression, and minimal dependencies. I don't get the need of Jekyll or Hugo. They're bloated and it's a pain to customize so called "themes". I'm OK with 'boring' HTML and CSS.
- kabisote 10y ago
  +1 for Hugo.
- allover 10y ago
  It's great you built your own tool and workflow that suits you, but there's no need to declare things 'bloated', just because they include things you don't want to use. That's your opinion. Its defaults suit me pretty well, and it's really well documented.
  - mrswag 10y ago
    Bad wording on my side, sorry. My grief is mostly against some prominent themes that weight 5 MB a page, and feature jQuery to animate the menu.
    - allover 10y ago
      Cool, I hear you but Jekyll actually comes with a very minimal theme (when you 'jekyll new my-site'). Heavy 3rd party themes aren't really the fault of Jekyll.
- ngrilly 10y ago
  What do you use for the local webserver, spell check and image image compression?
  - mrswag 10y ago
    `python -m SimpleHTTPServer` for the local server (or if you prefer the python3 variant, `python3 -m http.server`), aspell for the spell check, and OptiPNG for PNG compression. I didn't found something (yet) for JPEG.
schappim 10y ago
A number of our portfolio sites (including http://piaustralia.com.au http://piaustralia.com.au ) are static html hosted on AWS S3 + Cloudfront. The sites are created using Middleman[1], a ruby static site generator which I've found to be a little bit more flexible than Jekyll. On our static sites, we grab inventory information as JSONP from a small Sinatra based service on Elastic Beanstalk with read only access to the DB. Other than this and the checkout (we'll get to that in a bit), everything is client side Javascript utilising local storage for the cart state. We do not host our own checkout. Instead we use Shopify's ancient and way under-publicised "Cart Links"[2] feature. Cart Links let you pre-populate a cart and send the user to the checkout if you so wish. To upload the static files to S3 we use an awesome program called S3_website which knows how to look for the rendered html from a number of static site generators, and sync it to S3. It's also smart enough to setup redirects, invalidate CDN caches and even gzipping content. It's freaking amazing[3]. [1] Middleman - https://middlemanapp.com https://middlemanapp.com [2] Shopify Cart Links - https://help.shopify.com/themes/customization/cart/use-permalinks-to-preload-cart https://help.shopify.com/themes/customization/cart/use-perma... [3] S3_website - https://github.com/laurilehmijoki/s3_website https://github.com/laurilehmijoki/s3_website
- deanpcmad 10y ago
  All my small sites are hosted on S3. It's perfect for them! They are all built on Jekyll but I'll check Middleman out
- raverbashing 10y ago
  Any good recommendations on setting S3 links for public access? (permissions wise)
  - schappim 10y ago
    You can use a bucket policy e.g. https://ariejan.net/2010/12/24/public-readable-amazon-s3-bucket-policy/ https://ariejan.net/2010/12/24/public-readable-amazon-s3-buc...
  - StavrosK 10y ago
    I'd just use Netlify. Ever since they've changed their pricing to have basic static sites for free, I'm sold on them and like them a lot.
sharmi 10y ago
I use python based Nikola, a static blog generator. This i s for my personal blog. The killer features for me are using jupyter to write blog posts and custom urls for posts (which seem to be missing from pelican, the only other blog generator to support jupyter). The documentation is good for the usual tasks. In the extremely rare case when the documentation is not sufficient, the code is really easy to understand.
richie5um 10y ago
I use Hugo for static blog generation and GitHub pages for hosting. Works well, and, apart from the domain registration, is free.
JoshTriplett 10y ago
For blogs and personal sites, I'd suggest a static site generator such as ikiwiki (for self-hosting), Branchable (hosted), or Github Pages (hosted, but no SSL support for custom domains). In addition to SSL support, ikiwiki offers several other useful features for constructing a blog or news site, such as "take all the pages under blog/* and emit a page with the last 10 in reverse order, including an RSS feed".
fdik 10y ago
Have my own blog software, YBlog: http://blog.fdik.org/yblog2.tar.bz2 http://blog.fdik.org/yblog2.tar.bz2 Probably it's not feasable for most people, because it is heavily relying on YML2 http://fdik.org/yml http://fdik.org/yml and vim http://vim.org http://vim.org For CMS I really can recommend http://mezzanine.jupo.org/ http://mezzanine.jupo.org/ It also includes a Blog, is in Python/Django and is fulfilling all needs from very small to very large sites.
zakki 10y ago
Have your tried prestashop?
latteperday 10y ago
If it's for you, probably hand code. If it's for a client, try https://pulsecms.com https://pulsecms.com It allows you to create static sites with a CMS layer on top that clients can edit easily. Static sites all the way baby!
Giorgi 10y ago
There is none, that's why everyone it trying but failing to use static page generators, which are nowhere near the WP functionality
cyphar 10y ago
For my blog, I personally use Flask+Jinja with a custom markdown parsing setup[1]. Sure, it's not the best thing in the world but there's no database and in my experience it works pretty well. I've been meaning to set it up so that things are cached properly, but the machine is beefy enough to handle the current load. And let's be honest, if my blog gets HN'd I'll be too excited to be annoyed by having to switch to a static setup. [1]: https://github.com/cyphar/cyphar.com https://github.com/cyphar/cyphar.com
joshkpeterson 10y ago
I used kirby for a brochureware project and it went really well.
antileet 10y ago
I use https://getgrav.org/ https://getgrav.org/ and this is why: - No DB. Use a flat file layout similar to Jekyll or static site generators. - Offers dynamic features like redirecting and custom routing when you need it. This isn't possible with a pure static site generator. - Decent optional panel to write, edit and manage almost all aspects of your site. - Quite fast once you set it up with good caching.
- pps 10y ago
  This one is amazing, thank you!
- FanaHOVA 10y ago
  +1, I use Grav too for my blog. Admin panel is really light, there's a lot of skeletons based on modern templates and they are a much smaller number which can be bad but also good so that you don't get overwhelmed by crappy stuff like it happens with Wordpress.
- ZenoArrow 10y ago
  Grav looks promising, thanks for the heads up.
- ar-jan 10y ago
  +1 for Grav
- therealmarv 10y ago
  I first thought cool. On second look I see it is based on PHP. I'm sure newest PHP is really fast and advanced but I don't want to invest any of my time on that language (just my personal opinion). Update: OK, it also runs on nginx. Made a wrong claim it does not run on it. Sorry.
  - theossuary 10y ago
    Well that shouldn't be true. Firstly there is no good reason why any PHP framework would ever require a specific web server, so the claim seems dubious. A little reading in their installation guide confirms Grav should work with any web server: https://learn.getgrav.org/basics/installation https://learn.getgrav.org/basics/installation
darylteo 10y ago
As in the previous thread, I'll just cautiously mention OctoberCMS. I don't know if they will do the job, I'm evaluating it for my client projects for project briefs starting with "we'd like a CMS... " It is just as Open Source. However, it's newer, but has just hit stable recently. A strong plugin system. Purposed built for CMS from the ground up, built on Laravel with all the nice things.
max_ 10y ago
I use Lektor http://getlektor.com http://getlektor.com
dualogy 10y ago
Prefer my own hacked-together static site generator. First iteration [1] was a mess, next (more-robust cleaner and faster) one is coming along nicely [2] and should replace [1] "any-day-now".. (nb. If you need Markdown or restructuredText, this isn't for you for the time being, writing a few <p> or <h2> tags and the rare occasional <a> link never much bothered me since ~1998, images/nav have some Haskell-coded "Xtender-renderers" (simplified and no-recompile-needed custom html 'subtemplates' aka 'controls' coming in [2] though), and for more verbose text-content-only tags such `code` or `blockquote` it's easy to set up self-expanding short-tags such as `{X{c:code goes here}}` and `{X{bq:blockquote text here}}` etc.. ;) [1] https://github.com/metaleap/HaXtatic/ https://github.com/metaleap/HaXtatic/ [2] https://github.com/metaleap/HaXtatic/tree/master/__tmp_nu_ https://github.com/metaleap/HaXtatic/tree/master/__tmp_nu_
- erikb 10y ago
  If you're able to pull it off (i.e. have the time to iterate until it works) this is probably the best solution for the blogging part. Highest level of flexibility, a lot to learn, not too hard startegic-wise.
  - dualogy 10y ago
    Heh. I think static-site-gens are the new "PHP/ASP CMS": as in, every small-time coder writes their own from scratch now ;D v0 "works" already, it's just stupidly inefficient and too messy code to properly refactor (vs rewrite from scratch)..
    - erikb 10y ago
      Trust me when I tell you that refactoring is nearly always the better solution. Consider that rewriting from scratch doesn't necessarily yield a better result than what you have already.
kowdermeister 10y ago
https://ghost.org/ https://ghost.org/ blogs are really awesome. It's Node.js based, simple to install. I don't like static generators, that authoring experience is just not for me.
- shortformblog 10y ago
  I use Ghost for my site http://tedium.co http://tedium.co, and I've been able to do some interesting things with it. I like the flexibility it offers without the cruft of WordPress. That said, I do sometimes look longingly at static site generators and wonder what's on the other side.
- tedmiston 10y ago
  Ghost for me as well [1]. I like the UI and how lightweight it is vs something like WordPress. I also like being able to make quick content tweaks without redeploying like with a static site generator. [1]: http://blog.tedmiston.com/ http://blog.tedmiston.com/
mbrock 10y ago
My default choice is XML with XSLT and a simple Makefile to generate the HTML.
- therealmarv 10y ago
  Haha I like that. But I like also XSLT. Many people think we are strange! :P
  - mbrock 10y ago
    I think XML, for all the hate it gets, is so much nicer for extensible markup than all the weird template languages people invent daily... And XSLT/XPath are really nice too. I just need to figure out how to shell out to external programs from libxslt's xsltproc and then I'll be able to do anything I want...
- tannhaeuser 10y ago
  That would've been my choice a couple years ago and I still like this kind of setup for its transparency and maintainability. In fact, I've created sgmljs.net ("isomorphic" SGML + Prolog/Datalog + JavaScript-microservices web stack) to support both in-browser and (static or dynamic) backend preparation of your HTML, XML, or markdown files. SGML has built-in dependency graph info so there's no need for Makefiles and OS command invocations. Unlike XSLT, SGML can parse and produce fully-featured HTML5. (Parts of) SGML constitutes a meta-language for injection- and XSS-free templating (designed to be non-Turing-complete, unlike XSLT). SGML also allows definition of custom Wiki syntaxes (sgmljs has full markdown support).
- codegeek 10y ago
  "XML with XSLT" You reminded me of my college days circa 2003. Built some fun projects with XSLT and XPATH.
RockoZ 10y ago
https://rocko.xyz https://rocko.xyz
wanda 10y ago
Perch is a fantastic solution for both content and commerce sites: https://grabaperch.com https://grabaperch.com there's also Flatmarket which I've been meaning to recommend for someone else to try: https://christophercliff.com/flatmarket/ https://christophercliff.com/flatmarket/ https://github.com/christophercliff/flatmarket https://github.com/christophercliff/flatmarket Most websites I make for people I make with Wordpress or Ghost because the client likes them. My own site is static html — I wrote the current version by hand, but I have since made a rudimentary Perl script to quicken the process.
wincent 10y ago
I made an over-engineered, intricate snowflake for it, for fun: https://github.com/wincent/masochist https://github.com/wincent/masochist Markdown content stored in Git, custom indexes in Redis/memcached, data fetched via GraphQL, rendered with React, published with`git push`. Not at all the right tool for the job, but I had a lot of fun building it.
- rojobuffalo 10y ago
  Maybe over-engineered, but I really like the result in both the codebase and UI. I'm just curious about your terminology--how do you distinguish what is a 'snippet', 'wiki', or 'blog' post?
  - wincent 10y ago
    Wiki for "reference" material, blog for mostly "long form" writing, and snippets as a random grab bag of unorganized content (analagous to gists).
    - rojobuffalo 10y ago
      Cool, this is exactly the idea I was starting to build from scratch with almost the same stack. I might substitute "Library" where you use the term "Wiki". I think wiki is supposed to mean collaborative editing, but I will be the only one posting/editing (initially at least). Do you have a mechanism for controlling publish state (like draft, published, archive)? Other than honoring the CC license you have for that project, are there any other concerns you have about using it as a boilerplate? This project will be focused on sustainable food systems just fyi.
    - rojobuffalo 10y ago
      Also--do you have a way to search more than one tag at a time? If you don't currently, is that something you might consider?
eb0la 10y ago
I really love CityDesk from FogCreek software. That was the static CMS used my Joel Spolsky. I downloaded a long time ago, and had to buy it because it worked very well. Now it is EOLed and I am looking for something similar, but cannot find it. Tried Jeckyl but I am not convinced, although I really love ruby.
- ufmace 10y ago
  Yes, even Joel doesn't recommend it anymore... https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2016/12/09/rip-citydesk/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2016/12/09/rip-citydesk/
anotheryou 10y ago
For personal use or client proof?
jwatte 10y ago
HTML and JavaScript and Postgres.
mattkevan 10y ago
Jekyll or Hugo, hosted for free on Netlify and using Forestry.io or Cloudcannon as the CMS. Jekyll is great for blogs and simple brochure sites, go Hugo (heh) if you need something more complex. Hugo is much faster than Jekyll when running builds on larger sites. I'd recommend Snipcart for e-commerce. Recently built a shop with it, using Jekyll as the framework. I've made a number of online stores with a variety of platforms and this was the easiest - took about 15 mins. Cheaper than Shopify too. Edit: Here's a guide from Snipcart on how to do it - https://snipcart.com/blog/static-site-e-commerce-part-2-integrating-snipcart-with-jekyll https://snipcart.com/blog/static-site-e-commerce-part-2-inte... (I have nothing to do with Snipcart, just like the service)
- thirdsun 10y ago
  Slightly offtopic: I'm very interested in trying Snipcart, again. Back when we had to decide between Snipcart and Shopify's SDK for a static site, Snipcart's lack of product management was a dealbreaker. Shopify's administration interface, in contrast, is fantastic. However there are some issues which Shopify doesn't intend to fix at all, like their handling of EU vat calculation or the fact that refunds aren't enough to get Shopify's transaction fee back (like it is the case for Paypal, Stripe and others) - with Shopify you have to cancel the order, which in my opinion, is a misleading order status. A refunded/exchanged order is not a canceled order.
  - schappim 10y ago
    Shopify's biggest issue is the fact that you can't edit the line items for an order, or the billing information. This is a monumental flaw, which has been round since day 1. To get round this Shopify's sale people recommend hacks like 3rd party app that delete the original order and create a new order. This actually has a whole heap of unintended consequences. I'd say this is the biggest reason for us looking for an alternative. The best ecommerce backend I've seen is Neto.com.au however their performance (front end site latency) is shockingly terrible.
  - maxlaboisson 10y ago
    While products and variants are still defined on-site (unless you’re using a CMS plugin), we—Snipcart—did ship out-of-the-box inventory management in the dashboard a few months ago. Keep us in the loop about that feature next time you try out the product. Feedback always goes a long way for us!
muro 10y ago
Blogger :)
madc 10y ago
We're huge fans of Bolt (http://bolt.cm http://bolt.cm) for small and medium sized websites. Its based on Synfony (PHP) and Twig and allows super easy creation of content types by configuration.
mattkevan 10y ago
Had a conversation with a potential client about this the other day: For a small store I wouldn't recommend anything other than Shopify or Squarespace as they're cheap, nicely designed [0], secure enough and will meet 90% of anyone's needs out of the box. Once the client is up and running and have figured things out a bit, something more custom may be appropriate - perhaps a static site with an e-commerce provider such as Snipcart or Gumroad (as I've mentioned in another comment). Only when a client has serious cash to spend and serious requirements, such as integrating with CRMs and fulfilment systems or complex user roles and permissions should they even begin to consider something like Wordpress or Drupal - or even Magento (shudder). [0] My main gripe with Squarespace is that their templates are optimised for looking fantastic in demos over being usable for more mundane content. Very few clients are able to produce the quality of photography demanded by the designs.
- vinhboy 10y ago
  Good comment. Whole heartedly agree. Our job is to give them what they need, not what we think is cool. I hate it when developers over-engineer their client's needs. It becomes a costly maintenance nightmare down the road for everyone.
  - mattkevan 10y ago
    Absolutely. I see it a lot, especially in charities and non-profits, and it makes me angry. They're sold on platforms which are too complex and expensive, just because they don't know (or are not informed) how much things should cost or what the alternatives are. Like you say, it's our job to provide what people need, and trustworthy relationships over short-term gain are always more valuable in the long run.
scandox 10y ago
I think the comments here shoq that there is a massive opportunity for a Wordpress Killer. Nothing I've seen listed could replace Wordpress for the majority of non technical clients I would hand over a CMS managed site to.
- sparkzilla 10y ago
  It's more likely to mean that Wordpress works well enough for most non-technical site owners, and that building a competitor is a losing proposition.
- illuminea 10y ago
  We believe the platform we are developing, Strattic, could fill the gaps - it publishes WordPress (and other platforms) as static sites. That way non-technical clients still get their CMS, and developers get a production static site. Best of both worlds. https://strattic.com https://strattic.com
  - scandox 10y ago
    Actually that sounds like something that I could use. How are you going to handle plugins? Or will you not? I suppose you could support plugins that provide content transformations...but not plugins that are more dynamic...
cygned 10y ago
Bonsai (http://tinytree.info/); http://tinytree.info/); because no other static page generator has been so easy yet customizable.
- schappim 10y ago
  What can it do that https://middlemanapp.com https://middlemanapp.com can't?
samnwa 10y ago
Allthink is pretty good.
mariani 10y ago
I'm on Hugo CMS myself but considered just using medium.com at one point but that won't help you for the e-commerce part.
thestepafter 10y ago
I personally have really enjoyed working with Statamic. It is built on Laravel and super easy to customized.
dombili 10y ago
I have a private blog that I write for my own to better my writing skills. I use Ulysses (the app) with a custom style (CSS) and extract my posts to an HTML file. I then upload the HTML file and the CSS file, which Ulysses also extracts, to S3, so then I can view it and read it from time to time. I realize this isn't the most elegant solution, but it works for me because I have very specific requirements from a CMS and I haven't been able to find them in any of the CMSes out there. (Most of them don't even have a clue as to what "minimalism" means.)
navs 10y ago
I see static site tools are still trending. I've used a variety of static site tools for play but never had a client opt for it. Probably the only static site I'm currently running is for my local Auckland CSS meetup and that's just plain ol' hard coded HTML. For those clients that require a CMS and not specifically a blog, I use http://processwire.com http://processwire.com The plugin ecosystem is lacking but I've always been impressed with its performance and intuitive API. I don't currently run e-commerce on it but Gumroad would be my first choice if I had to.
- sheraz 10y ago
  I always push Processwire for questions like this. It is very versatile and makes for a capable CMS / blog / whatever. I'm planning on using processwire to build a webstore with either Foxycart or Snipcart. Just as a starter I will be moving my personal blog over to it just so I can have one processwire app in production.
cjoh 10y ago
I've really enjoyed OctoberCMS: http://octobercms.com http://octobercms.com
callesgg 10y ago
Opencart: The code quality is not good, but it has loots of good functionality and making small modifications is fairly simple.
postscapes1 10y ago
Webhook.org A great open source CMS based on Firebase that outputs a static site. Easy to do relationship fields, create JSON templates, customize for clients. Only issue is developers have stalled out on project dev and basic support. Would love to pay more if someone could fork and take up the charge.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
jimnotgym 10y ago
For blogs HTML, although I soon wish I used a CMS For e-commerce, I never want to see Magento again (used at company where I work) and would look squarely at Shopify next time For both uses any self hosted CMS feels like you spend too much time as admin/configurator
justinlaster 10y ago
I've recently been using Hexo for blogs: https://hexo.io/ https://hexo.io/
stephengillie 10y ago
Part of my Dropbox file tree is synched to a server hosting it with IIS - so I just throw a flat file in my /HTML/ folder and link to it on Gilgamech.com.
- amorphid 10y ago
  (It sounds like you have Dropbox installed on the actual server. If that is the case, disregard...) Dropbox is doing away with allowing you to publicly share docs, so now/soon one can't use Dropbox for hosting static websites anymore.
  - stephengillie 10y ago
    Yeah, that's one of the issues I avoid by directly hosting the files, instead of using them as a web host. I'd use Neocities if I didn't have my own server. (My server is just my old gaming PC, on my home internet.)
wishinghand 10y ago
The flat file Kirby CMS is a great option. The starter template has a basic blog implementation, it's easy to start modifying to look like what you want, and it has a basic admin panel for adding new pages/posts that's client friendly, unlike a static site generator. If you're not into making your own theme, there's a site for buying them called getkirby-themes.com which most other flat file CMS options don't have. It used PHP and can run quite quickly if you setup caching and PHP 7 on your host. Content is generated from txt files that can have any number of fields (titles, subtitles, body, asides, meta info, etc). As for ecommerce, I use Ecwid. It's a separate login to manage products, but it's also free for 10 or fewer products. After that it's a very reasonable monthly fee.
TBloom 10y ago
If you're a fan of React, Gatsby is an excellent project to check out: https://github.com/gatsbyjs/gatsby https://github.com/gatsbyjs/gatsby
at-fates-hands 10y ago
All good recommendations here, but I'd add a few more. . I say take a look at Keystone CMS (http://keystonejs.com/ http://keystonejs.com/) - it's a Node based CMS and is really easy to work with and has tons of options to customize as you need it. My other recommendation would be to use Spike - (https://www.spike.cf/ https://www.spike.cf/) (from the same guys who built Roots) along with rooftop CMS (https://www.rooftopcms.com/ https://www.rooftopcms.com/) or Contentful CMS (https://www.contentful.com/ https://www.contentful.com/)
my123 10y ago
Orchard works quite well after it is setted up properly.
zie 10y ago
Sphinx. Lots of documentation uses it, so it can do most anything, plus if you are familiar with Sphinx, you will be hopefully more likely to write your documentation as well :)
koolba 10y ago
Harp is pretty good: https://harpjs.com/ https://harpjs.com/ If you're already comfortable with the node.js world it's easy to hack it if you want to support something new as well. Out of the box it requires very minimal setup to get things going.
pmorici 10y ago
For a small store that is super easy to setup I would use Weebly. You can also do a blog through it.
diegocerdan 10y ago
I'm looking for a CMS that outputs static generated pages with a progressive web app approach. Any references?
kyasui 10y ago
I'm a big fan of SiteLeaf - https://www.siteleaf.com/ https://www.siteleaf.com/ CMS for static sites (Using Jekyll under the hood)
tomw1808 10y ago
Pimcore. https://www.pimcore.org/en https://www.pimcore.org/en
cryptos 10y ago
After testing some static site generators I've settled with Hugo and never looked back. I like especially the fact that I only have a single static file with no further dependencies. And the speed is fantastic. Hot reloading is very useful.
Zelmor 10y ago
I sort of like werc, the framework behind cat-v. I would only imagine it for a personal site/portfolio, however, and not for commercial or business use.
manmal 10y ago
Craft CMS. It allows you to define a meta model in a convenient editor, and lets you render out data with a template engine (HTML/JSON/...). The meta-meta-model consists of a few sensible objects, so it's not just UML rendered down. It has fine grained access control, so you can define which user can access what data. Things like image uploads in the backend (admin) area are solved. E.g you can setup an S3 bucket that is used for your site's dynamic assets. Security updates are one-click-installs and I'd say there is at least one per week. There are plenty of plugins available, too. It's a bit pricey (compared to FOSS) if you use it for clients, but you can develop for free or even host your own website for free with it. I've used it twice so far, and I enjoyed it very much.
galfarragem 10y ago
Is there already a 'Jekyll' on Crystal? Jekyll with hugo speed, that would be awesome!
ctcliff 10y ago
I developed a static site generator for e-commerce called Flatmarket: https://github.com/christophercliff/flatmarket https://github.com/christophercliff/flatmarket It lacks some of the features you'd get with a dedicated backend service but it's truly static and costs about $0.004/transaction on AWS Lambda (not including Stripe's take).
- sgallant 10y ago
  I love the artwork for your demo site. Where did you get it? https://christophercliff.com/flatmarket/ https://christophercliff.com/flatmarket/
  - ctcliff 10y ago
    An old stock art CD-ROM by Redouté.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
yranadive 10y ago
If you just care about hosting code and snippets I'd try GrepPage. It lets you search your stores from the command-line and the web. (Disclaimer I'm the creator of GrepPage).
pwenzel 10y ago
I have grown to love Jade/Pug templates, compiled with npm scripts. You can build your own site generator to convert pug templates with the simple command `pug --watch`.
pvdebbe 10y ago
TextPattern was my favourite back when, even if it featured very awkward ideas (all content, styles, maintenance goes through their web interface to database -- good luck with unix tools to compare, diff and patch changes). These days static content is the only valid answer in my books. I don't want to spend my nights worrying about rotting PHP/Ruby/NodeJS runtimes behind the scenes.
jeshan25 10y ago
Jekyll/Lektor as a static CMS. Deployed to Amazon S3 backed by Cloudfront CDN. All of this gives me: ease of deploy, AWS's reliable infrastructure, ultra fast website (can easily score 90+ out of 100 on google's pagespeed insights tool), delivered over SSL with a free certificate on my own domain, "infinite" scale, etc. All of this can literally run on cents of a dollar per month.
lucabenazzi 10y ago
Webflow + DPD (digital downloads), or Webflow + Shopify (physical goods) If your CMS is not supposed to do anything particularly fancy and if you don't want the annoyance of dealing with techy staff, Webflow is currently the best website builder that I know. It's a visual tool and that saves you lots of time, especially if you are tech savvy. They are just releasing a CMS API that is going to make it even more flexible. If you are selling real goods, Webflow integrates with Shopify very efficiently. If you are selling digital downloads, I'd consider DPD, which is in many ways better for digital downloads since it was born just for to do that. I am currently using it and I am very satisfied.
maxt 10y ago
I love Chyrp[1] but have since moved away from PHP and am looking into static solutions like Jekyll, or Ghost[2]. I always make sure to proxy Ghost through a CDN because it lessens the load on my server. For digital products, I use Sellfy and Selly[#] [1] https://github.com/chyrp/chyrp https://github.com/chyrp/chyrp [2] https://github.com/TryGhost https://github.com/TryGhost [#] https://sellfy.com/ https://sellfy.com/ [#] https://selly.gg/ https://selly.gg/
anngrant 10y ago
Squarespace can be a good alternative to WordPress. Both have the potential to help you create beautiful and powerful websites. Though WordPress is more flexible & customizable especially with plugins. I've just downloaded a cool WP theme for my website - https://www.templatemonster.com/wordpress-themes/monstroid2.html https://www.templatemonster.com/wordpress-themes/monstroid2.... . It's a multipurpose theme that can be used for creating any website you need.

339 points by travisby 10y ago

I used to work a lot with Wordpress in the past, but as projects tend to be more and more specific, I found Middleman[1] more flexible and for structured content (eg. directories) or for generating pages automatically, using a YAML structure is very convenient. For my online shop, I use Shopify[2] as it is a side project and I did not want to spend a lot of time writing / setting it up. Shopify proves very convenient and includes a blog if needed. [1] Middleman - https://middlemanapp.com https://middlemanapp.com [2] Shopify - https://www.shopify.com https://www.shopify.com

dbg31415 10y ago

If you already think we're going to say WordPress, what do you want to do that WordPress doesn't do? I don't like WordPress for eCommerce, but I think it's great for blogs and content sites. For eCommerce... just too many variables. Who you want to use for fulfillment, what other systems you want to integrate with, if you need a staging instance or customer loyalty software or any of the 50 other things you can integrate. For content... Ghost is OK. Just... WordPress has thought of everything already. Plugins, solid UX, extra features you didn't know to ask for... it's hard for other platforms to catch up.

weavie 10y ago
For me, it is quite a shallow reason. I just don't enjoy developing in PHP. Wordpress is amazing at what it does, but I always dread having to touch it. There is nothing else that gets close to it (that I have found) in terms of ease of use for the users, which is why I keep having to return to it. I long for the day when someone writes something just as good in Haskell (hey, I can dream..).
- dbg31415 10y ago
  You code so little with Word Press, there's an extension for like everything you own or do you already. It's more just configuration stuff, right? What are you trying to do with your new site?
  - weavie 10y ago
    I like to really understand what is going on under the hood. If I don't quite understand how something works I like to read the source code. Also sometimes a plugin doesn't quite do exactly what I want, or is so large and complex due to trying to cater for everyone that I just feel uneasy about using it and so for simple things I prefer to just write a little code that does exactly what I need and no more. Plus, I am a coder. And coders code so that's what I do. It's just a psychological thing...
- codygman 10y ago
  In regards to WordPress in haskell, I wish for the same! I've been following clckwrks off and on for a few years, I wonder if it's secure plugin API was ever finished... https://github.com/clckwrks/clckwrks https://github.com/clckwrks/clckwrks Edit: https://github.com/clckwrks/web-plugins https://github.com/clckwrks/web-plugins

technion 10y ago

Things I hear CMS developers talking about: Constantly applying security updates. The lack of maintenance on their favourite plugins. Which caching plugins works the best. How important a CDN is. The need for security plugins, which themselves are often exploited. The HN/Reddit hug of death. Whether a host has suitable versions of PHP. "Webscale" being ten users a minute. I don't get it. I've been using a static site built in Jekyll, which just works(tm). I recently rebuilt my blog with AMP compliance, and it still looks the way I want it to. If you're not Ruby person, there's Hugo as a Go alternative. For blogs, we really should be seeing the end of maintenance, vulnerabilities, and static pages are cheaper to host. Edit: of course, I answered the blog question, but not the ecommerce one.

danso 10y ago
Worth noting that you don't have to be a Ruby person to effectively use Jekyll. Most of the dynamic features are implemented in the Liquid templating language -- I hardly ever touched any Ruby when dealing with Jekyll, especially if I were using it in conjunction with (typical) Github Pages, which whitelists Jekyll plugins and thus incentivizes sticking with the simple vanilla setup.
- musikele 10y ago
  I'm not a ruby person but I use Jekyll for a lot of projects. What I can't do is write plugins, but you should really have strong custom requirements to need a plugin.
  - amorphid 10y ago
    I know Ruby, and was recently a business "can't write my own plug-ins" person. If you have a plug-in need that would be handy for you, feel free to ping me. For fun, I'll craft you a demo that incorporates what you'd need to know to write that plug-in yourself, with source code and a how-to Youtube video!
- youngtaff 10y ago
  You don't have to be a Ruby person but it helps when your Ruby dependencies break, then your Jekyll blog won't build and you have no idea why! I tend to blow it all away and start again in this situation, when I've got time I intend to move away from Jekyll

bbcbasic 10y ago

Github pages. Free hosting. Just fork a Jekyll template and off you go.

bharani_m 10y ago

Ghost + Gumroad (selling products) would be a decent alternative. Other options are to go with static site generators like Middleman or Hugo for your blog and setting up a shop on Shopify or Sellfy. As a side note, I have open sourced the code [1] for my shop/blog that is running at https://www.authenticpixels.com https://www.authenticpixels.com. It is written in Elixir/Phoenix. [1] https://github.com/authentic-pixels/ex-shop https://github.com/authentic-pixels/ex-shop

tomcam 10y ago
Site runs very fast. Congratulations
- bharani_m 10y ago
  Thanks! I have tried to reduce the JS & CSS being used on the page. I've only included the grid and navbar components from Bootstrap's CSS framework and there is pretty minimal JS involved. I have used Turbolinks to replace the <body> tag on each request via ajax.
lfender6445 10y ago
Ghost runs on express for those interested, so its very easy to extend if need be

danieldk 10y ago

Jekyll/Hakyll for blogs. They are both very customizable, you can write Markdown, and since they produce static pages you have one security worry less.

sgdesign 10y ago

If this is for a client that can't manage a static site themselves, then I would probably look into splitting out the content editing part. For example services like https://www.datocms.com/ https://www.datocms.com/ let you publish to a separate static site generator.

thirdsun 10y ago
I just discovered Dato when I was looking for a CMS for Middleman and it looks fantastic. Expensive, but it seems to be an excellent choice for client work.

milankragujevic 10y ago

Custom CMS in PHP. That's what I always use for everything.

altharaz 10y ago

It depends on your skills/needs. Do you want to customize everything with ease? Do you have someone who can maintain the security of your blog and eventually add new features later? => WordPress on your own hosting Do you want to use a very classical theme? Do you want a complete service with no skills required and no maintenance? => Wix or WordPress.com Do you want to customize everything? Do you have someone to maintain the blog on a regular base? => Jekyll on GitHub or on your own hosting Shall you need to sell things online with the blog, WordPress can be augmented with Shopify, meanwhile Wix has already this feature.

xiaoma 10y ago

Squarespace is the clear option. It's even faster to get set up with than WP and in the past 2 years has become a truly viable competitor.

apapli 10y ago
I really like Squarespace too, but just be wary if you have a site information architecture that needs to go beyond 1 level of menus. It doesn't handle sub-levels well. I'd also really appreciate it if they let you save a template page (eg for a landing page) for easy re-use. Re-creating specific landing pages and thank you pages for each campaign we run is a bit of a pain as what I really just want to do is change a few paragraphs of text and update an image or two for these.
- deutronium 10y ago
  The lack of multiple levels of menus is something I noticed with Ghost too, when I last played with it. Also I'm wondering, with Squarespace, it's not clear whether you can install on your own server or not
  - nsp 10y ago
    You cannot self host square space.

iamslash 10y ago

I think jekyll is the best thing to blog something. And I recommend to hosting it on github for free.

mrswag 10y ago

I generate static webpages from markdown in a < 100 lines bash script. It's just a for loop using sed, pygments and markdown, hosted on github. It has a local webserver, spell check, optional image compression, and minimal dependencies. I don't get the need of Jekyll or Hugo. They're bloated and it's a pain to customize so called "themes". I'm OK with 'boring' HTML and CSS.

kabisote 10y ago
+1 for Hugo.
allover 10y ago
It's great you built your own tool and workflow that suits you, but there's no need to declare things 'bloated', just because they include things you don't want to use. That's your opinion. Its defaults suit me pretty well, and it's really well documented.
- mrswag 10y ago
  Bad wording on my side, sorry. My grief is mostly against some prominent themes that weight 5 MB a page, and feature jQuery to animate the menu.
  - allover 10y ago
    Cool, I hear you but Jekyll actually comes with a very minimal theme (when you 'jekyll new my-site'). Heavy 3rd party themes aren't really the fault of Jekyll.
ngrilly 10y ago
What do you use for the local webserver, spell check and image image compression?
- mrswag 10y ago
  `python -m SimpleHTTPServer` for the local server (or if you prefer the python3 variant, `python3 -m http.server`), aspell for the spell check, and OptiPNG for PNG compression. I didn't found something (yet) for JPEG.

schappim 10y ago

A number of our portfolio sites (including http://piaustralia.com.au http://piaustralia.com.au ) are static html hosted on AWS S3 + Cloudfront. The sites are created using Middleman[1], a ruby static site generator which I've found to be a little bit more flexible than Jekyll. On our static sites, we grab inventory information as JSONP from a small Sinatra based service on Elastic Beanstalk with read only access to the DB. Other than this and the checkout (we'll get to that in a bit), everything is client side Javascript utilising local storage for the cart state. We do not host our own checkout. Instead we use Shopify's ancient and way under-publicised "Cart Links"[2] feature. Cart Links let you pre-populate a cart and send the user to the checkout if you so wish. To upload the static files to S3 we use an awesome program called S3_website which knows how to look for the rendered html from a number of static site generators, and sync it to S3. It's also smart enough to setup redirects, invalidate CDN caches and even gzipping content. It's freaking amazing[3]. [1] Middleman - https://middlemanapp.com https://middlemanapp.com [2] Shopify Cart Links - https://help.shopify.com/themes/customization/cart/use-permalinks-to-preload-cart https://help.shopify.com/themes/customization/cart/use-perma... [3] S3_website - https://github.com/laurilehmijoki/s3_website https://github.com/laurilehmijoki/s3_website

deanpcmad 10y ago
All my small sites are hosted on S3. It's perfect for them! They are all built on Jekyll but I'll check Middleman out
raverbashing 10y ago
Any good recommendations on setting S3 links for public access? (permissions wise)
- schappim 10y ago
  You can use a bucket policy e.g. https://ariejan.net/2010/12/24/public-readable-amazon-s3-bucket-policy/ https://ariejan.net/2010/12/24/public-readable-amazon-s3-buc...
- StavrosK 10y ago
  I'd just use Netlify. Ever since they've changed their pricing to have basic static sites for free, I'm sold on them and like them a lot.

sharmi 10y ago

I use python based Nikola, a static blog generator. This i s for my personal blog. The killer features for me are using jupyter to write blog posts and custom urls for posts (which seem to be missing from pelican, the only other blog generator to support jupyter). The documentation is good for the usual tasks. In the extremely rare case when the documentation is not sufficient, the code is really easy to understand.

richie5um 10y ago

I use Hugo for static blog generation and GitHub pages for hosting. Works well, and, apart from the domain registration, is free.

JoshTriplett 10y ago

For blogs and personal sites, I'd suggest a static site generator such as ikiwiki (for self-hosting), Branchable (hosted), or Github Pages (hosted, but no SSL support for custom domains). In addition to SSL support, ikiwiki offers several other useful features for constructing a blog or news site, such as "take all the pages under blog/* and emit a page with the last 10 in reverse order, including an RSS feed".

fdik 10y ago

Have my own blog software, YBlog: http://blog.fdik.org/yblog2.tar.bz2 http://blog.fdik.org/yblog2.tar.bz2 Probably it's not feasable for most people, because it is heavily relying on YML2 http://fdik.org/yml http://fdik.org/yml and vim http://vim.org http://vim.org For CMS I really can recommend http://mezzanine.jupo.org/ http://mezzanine.jupo.org/ It also includes a Blog, is in Python/Django and is fulfilling all needs from very small to very large sites.

zakki 10y ago

Have your tried prestashop?

latteperday 10y ago

If it's for you, probably hand code. If it's for a client, try https://pulsecms.com https://pulsecms.com It allows you to create static sites with a CMS layer on top that clients can edit easily. Static sites all the way baby!

Giorgi 10y ago

There is none, that's why everyone it trying but failing to use static page generators, which are nowhere near the WP functionality

cyphar 10y ago

For my blog, I personally use Flask+Jinja with a custom markdown parsing setup[1]. Sure, it's not the best thing in the world but there's no database and in my experience it works pretty well. I've been meaning to set it up so that things are cached properly, but the machine is beefy enough to handle the current load. And let's be honest, if my blog gets HN'd I'll be too excited to be annoyed by having to switch to a static setup. [1]: https://github.com/cyphar/cyphar.com https://github.com/cyphar/cyphar.com

joshkpeterson 10y ago

I used kirby for a brochureware project and it went really well.

antileet 10y ago

I use https://getgrav.org/ https://getgrav.org/ and this is why: - No DB. Use a flat file layout similar to Jekyll or static site generators. - Offers dynamic features like redirecting and custom routing when you need it. This isn't possible with a pure static site generator. - Decent optional panel to write, edit and manage almost all aspects of your site. - Quite fast once you set it up with good caching.

pps 10y ago
This one is amazing, thank you!
FanaHOVA 10y ago
+1, I use Grav too for my blog. Admin panel is really light, there's a lot of skeletons based on modern templates and they are a much smaller number which can be bad but also good so that you don't get overwhelmed by crappy stuff like it happens with Wordpress.
ZenoArrow 10y ago
Grav looks promising, thanks for the heads up.
ar-jan 10y ago
+1 for Grav
therealmarv 10y ago
I first thought cool. On second look I see it is based on PHP. I'm sure newest PHP is really fast and advanced but I don't want to invest any of my time on that language (just my personal opinion). Update: OK, it also runs on nginx. Made a wrong claim it does not run on it. Sorry.
- theossuary 10y ago
  Well that shouldn't be true. Firstly there is no good reason why any PHP framework would ever require a specific web server, so the claim seems dubious. A little reading in their installation guide confirms Grav should work with any web server: https://learn.getgrav.org/basics/installation https://learn.getgrav.org/basics/installation

darylteo 10y ago

As in the previous thread, I'll just cautiously mention OctoberCMS. I don't know if they will do the job, I'm evaluating it for my client projects for project briefs starting with "we'd like a CMS... " It is just as Open Source. However, it's newer, but has just hit stable recently. A strong plugin system. Purposed built for CMS from the ground up, built on Laravel with all the nice things.

max_ 10y ago

I use Lektor http://getlektor.com http://getlektor.com

dualogy 10y ago

Prefer my own hacked-together static site generator. First iteration [1] was a mess, next (more-robust cleaner and faster) one is coming along nicely [2] and should replace [1] "any-day-now".. (nb. If you need Markdown or restructuredText, this isn't for you for the time being, writing a few <p> or <h2> tags and the rare occasional <a> link never much bothered me since ~1998, images/nav have some Haskell-coded "Xtender-renderers" (simplified and no-recompile-needed custom html 'subtemplates' aka 'controls' coming in [2] though), and for more verbose text-content-only tags such `code` or `blockquote` it's easy to set up self-expanding short-tags such as `{X{c:code goes here}}` and `{X{bq:blockquote text here}}` etc.. ;) [1] https://github.com/metaleap/HaXtatic/ https://github.com/metaleap/HaXtatic/ [2] https://github.com/metaleap/HaXtatic/tree/master/__tmp_nu_ https://github.com/metaleap/HaXtatic/tree/master/__tmp_nu_

erikb 10y ago
If you're able to pull it off (i.e. have the time to iterate until it works) this is probably the best solution for the blogging part. Highest level of flexibility, a lot to learn, not too hard startegic-wise.
- dualogy 10y ago
  Heh. I think static-site-gens are the new "PHP/ASP CMS": as in, every small-time coder writes their own from scratch now ;D v0 "works" already, it's just stupidly inefficient and too messy code to properly refactor (vs rewrite from scratch)..
  - erikb 10y ago
    Trust me when I tell you that refactoring is nearly always the better solution. Consider that rewriting from scratch doesn't necessarily yield a better result than what you have already.

kowdermeister 10y ago

https://ghost.org/ https://ghost.org/ blogs are really awesome. It's Node.js based, simple to install. I don't like static generators, that authoring experience is just not for me.

shortformblog 10y ago
I use Ghost for my site http://tedium.co http://tedium.co, and I've been able to do some interesting things with it. I like the flexibility it offers without the cruft of WordPress. That said, I do sometimes look longingly at static site generators and wonder what's on the other side.
tedmiston 10y ago
Ghost for me as well [1]. I like the UI and how lightweight it is vs something like WordPress. I also like being able to make quick content tweaks without redeploying like with a static site generator. [1]: http://blog.tedmiston.com/ http://blog.tedmiston.com/

mbrock 10y ago

My default choice is XML with XSLT and a simple Makefile to generate the HTML.

therealmarv 10y ago
Haha I like that. But I like also XSLT. Many people think we are strange! :P
- mbrock 10y ago
  I think XML, for all the hate it gets, is so much nicer for extensible markup than all the weird template languages people invent daily... And XSLT/XPath are really nice too. I just need to figure out how to shell out to external programs from libxslt's xsltproc and then I'll be able to do anything I want...
tannhaeuser 10y ago
That would've been my choice a couple years ago and I still like this kind of setup for its transparency and maintainability. In fact, I've created sgmljs.net ("isomorphic" SGML + Prolog/Datalog + JavaScript-microservices web stack) to support both in-browser and (static or dynamic) backend preparation of your HTML, XML, or markdown files. SGML has built-in dependency graph info so there's no need for Makefiles and OS command invocations. Unlike XSLT, SGML can parse and produce fully-featured HTML5. (Parts of) SGML constitutes a meta-language for injection- and XSS-free templating (designed to be non-Turing-complete, unlike XSLT). SGML also allows definition of custom Wiki syntaxes (sgmljs has full markdown support).
codegeek 10y ago
"XML with XSLT" You reminded me of my college days circa 2003. Built some fun projects with XSLT and XPATH.

RockoZ 10y ago

https://rocko.xyz https://rocko.xyz

wanda 10y ago

Perch is a fantastic solution for both content and commerce sites: https://grabaperch.com https://grabaperch.com there's also Flatmarket which I've been meaning to recommend for someone else to try: https://christophercliff.com/flatmarket/ https://christophercliff.com/flatmarket/ https://github.com/christophercliff/flatmarket https://github.com/christophercliff/flatmarket Most websites I make for people I make with Wordpress or Ghost because the client likes them. My own site is static html — I wrote the current version by hand, but I have since made a rudimentary Perl script to quicken the process.

wincent 10y ago

I made an over-engineered, intricate snowflake for it, for fun: https://github.com/wincent/masochist https://github.com/wincent/masochist Markdown content stored in Git, custom indexes in Redis/memcached, data fetched via GraphQL, rendered with React, published with`git push`. Not at all the right tool for the job, but I had a lot of fun building it.

rojobuffalo 10y ago
Maybe over-engineered, but I really like the result in both the codebase and UI. I'm just curious about your terminology--how do you distinguish what is a 'snippet', 'wiki', or 'blog' post?
- wincent 10y ago
  Wiki for "reference" material, blog for mostly "long form" writing, and snippets as a random grab bag of unorganized content (analagous to gists).
  - rojobuffalo 10y ago
    Cool, this is exactly the idea I was starting to build from scratch with almost the same stack. I might substitute "Library" where you use the term "Wiki". I think wiki is supposed to mean collaborative editing, but I will be the only one posting/editing (initially at least). Do you have a mechanism for controlling publish state (like draft, published, archive)? Other than honoring the CC license you have for that project, are there any other concerns you have about using it as a boilerplate? This project will be focused on sustainable food systems just fyi.
  - rojobuffalo 10y ago
    Also--do you have a way to search more than one tag at a time? If you don't currently, is that something you might consider?

eb0la 10y ago

I really love CityDesk from FogCreek software. That was the static CMS used my Joel Spolsky. I downloaded a long time ago, and had to buy it because it worked very well. Now it is EOLed and I am looking for something similar, but cannot find it. Tried Jeckyl but I am not convinced, although I really love ruby.

ufmace 10y ago
Yes, even Joel doesn't recommend it anymore... https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2016/12/09/rip-citydesk/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2016/12/09/rip-citydesk/

anotheryou 10y ago

For personal use or client proof?

jwatte 10y ago

HTML and JavaScript and Postgres.

mattkevan 10y ago

Jekyll or Hugo, hosted for free on Netlify and using Forestry.io or Cloudcannon as the CMS. Jekyll is great for blogs and simple brochure sites, go Hugo (heh) if you need something more complex. Hugo is much faster than Jekyll when running builds on larger sites. I'd recommend Snipcart for e-commerce. Recently built a shop with it, using Jekyll as the framework. I've made a number of online stores with a variety of platforms and this was the easiest - took about 15 mins. Cheaper than Shopify too. Edit: Here's a guide from Snipcart on how to do it - https://snipcart.com/blog/static-site-e-commerce-part-2-integrating-snipcart-with-jekyll https://snipcart.com/blog/static-site-e-commerce-part-2-inte... (I have nothing to do with Snipcart, just like the service)

thirdsun 10y ago
Slightly offtopic: I'm very interested in trying Snipcart, again. Back when we had to decide between Snipcart and Shopify's SDK for a static site, Snipcart's lack of product management was a dealbreaker. Shopify's administration interface, in contrast, is fantastic. However there are some issues which Shopify doesn't intend to fix at all, like their handling of EU vat calculation or the fact that refunds aren't enough to get Shopify's transaction fee back (like it is the case for Paypal, Stripe and others) - with Shopify you have to cancel the order, which in my opinion, is a misleading order status. A refunded/exchanged order is not a canceled order.
- schappim 10y ago
  Shopify's biggest issue is the fact that you can't edit the line items for an order, or the billing information. This is a monumental flaw, which has been round since day 1. To get round this Shopify's sale people recommend hacks like 3rd party app that delete the original order and create a new order. This actually has a whole heap of unintended consequences. I'd say this is the biggest reason for us looking for an alternative. The best ecommerce backend I've seen is Neto.com.au however their performance (front end site latency) is shockingly terrible.
- maxlaboisson 10y ago
  While products and variants are still defined on-site (unless you’re using a CMS plugin), we—Snipcart—did ship out-of-the-box inventory management in the dashboard a few months ago. Keep us in the loop about that feature next time you try out the product. Feedback always goes a long way for us!

muro 10y ago

Blogger :)

madc 10y ago

We're huge fans of Bolt (http://bolt.cm http://bolt.cm) for small and medium sized websites. Its based on Synfony (PHP) and Twig and allows super easy creation of content types by configuration.

mattkevan 10y ago

Had a conversation with a potential client about this the other day: For a small store I wouldn't recommend anything other than Shopify or Squarespace as they're cheap, nicely designed [0], secure enough and will meet 90% of anyone's needs out of the box. Once the client is up and running and have figured things out a bit, something more custom may be appropriate - perhaps a static site with an e-commerce provider such as Snipcart or Gumroad (as I've mentioned in another comment). Only when a client has serious cash to spend and serious requirements, such as integrating with CRMs and fulfilment systems or complex user roles and permissions should they even begin to consider something like Wordpress or Drupal - or even Magento (shudder). [0] My main gripe with Squarespace is that their templates are optimised for looking fantastic in demos over being usable for more mundane content. Very few clients are able to produce the quality of photography demanded by the designs.

vinhboy 10y ago
Good comment. Whole heartedly agree. Our job is to give them what they need, not what we think is cool. I hate it when developers over-engineer their client's needs. It becomes a costly maintenance nightmare down the road for everyone.
- mattkevan 10y ago
  Absolutely. I see it a lot, especially in charities and non-profits, and it makes me angry. They're sold on platforms which are too complex and expensive, just because they don't know (or are not informed) how much things should cost or what the alternatives are. Like you say, it's our job to provide what people need, and trustworthy relationships over short-term gain are always more valuable in the long run.

scandox 10y ago

I think the comments here shoq that there is a massive opportunity for a Wordpress Killer. Nothing I've seen listed could replace Wordpress for the majority of non technical clients I would hand over a CMS managed site to.

sparkzilla 10y ago
It's more likely to mean that Wordpress works well enough for most non-technical site owners, and that building a competitor is a losing proposition.
illuminea 10y ago
We believe the platform we are developing, Strattic, could fill the gaps - it publishes WordPress (and other platforms) as static sites. That way non-technical clients still get their CMS, and developers get a production static site. Best of both worlds. https://strattic.com https://strattic.com
- scandox 10y ago
  Actually that sounds like something that I could use. How are you going to handle plugins? Or will you not? I suppose you could support plugins that provide content transformations...but not plugins that are more dynamic...

cygned 10y ago

Bonsai (http://tinytree.info/); http://tinytree.info/); because no other static page generator has been so easy yet customizable.

schappim 10y ago
What can it do that https://middlemanapp.com https://middlemanapp.com can't?

samnwa 10y ago

Allthink is pretty good.

mariani 10y ago

I'm on Hugo CMS myself but considered just using medium.com at one point but that won't help you for the e-commerce part.

thestepafter 10y ago

I personally have really enjoyed working with Statamic. It is built on Laravel and super easy to customized.

dombili 10y ago

I have a private blog that I write for my own to better my writing skills. I use Ulysses (the app) with a custom style (CSS) and extract my posts to an HTML file. I then upload the HTML file and the CSS file, which Ulysses also extracts, to S3, so then I can view it and read it from time to time. I realize this isn't the most elegant solution, but it works for me because I have very specific requirements from a CMS and I haven't been able to find them in any of the CMSes out there. (Most of them don't even have a clue as to what "minimalism" means.)

navs 10y ago

I see static site tools are still trending. I've used a variety of static site tools for play but never had a client opt for it. Probably the only static site I'm currently running is for my local Auckland CSS meetup and that's just plain ol' hard coded HTML. For those clients that require a CMS and not specifically a blog, I use http://processwire.com http://processwire.com The plugin ecosystem is lacking but I've always been impressed with its performance and intuitive API. I don't currently run e-commerce on it but Gumroad would be my first choice if I had to.

sheraz 10y ago
I always push Processwire for questions like this. It is very versatile and makes for a capable CMS / blog / whatever. I'm planning on using processwire to build a webstore with either Foxycart or Snipcart. Just as a starter I will be moving my personal blog over to it just so I can have one processwire app in production.

cjoh 10y ago

I've really enjoyed OctoberCMS: http://octobercms.com http://octobercms.com

callesgg 10y ago

Opencart: The code quality is not good, but it has loots of good functionality and making small modifications is fairly simple.

postscapes1 10y ago

Webhook.org A great open source CMS based on Firebase that outputs a static site. Easy to do relationship fields, create JSON templates, customize for clients. Only issue is developers have stalled out on project dev and basic support. Would love to pay more if someone could fork and take up the charge.

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jimnotgym 10y ago

For blogs HTML, although I soon wish I used a CMS For e-commerce, I never want to see Magento again (used at company where I work) and would look squarely at Shopify next time For both uses any self hosted CMS feels like you spend too much time as admin/configurator

justinlaster 10y ago

I've recently been using Hexo for blogs: https://hexo.io/ https://hexo.io/

stephengillie 10y ago

Part of my Dropbox file tree is synched to a server hosting it with IIS - so I just throw a flat file in my /HTML/ folder and link to it on Gilgamech.com.

amorphid 10y ago
(It sounds like you have Dropbox installed on the actual server. If that is the case, disregard...) Dropbox is doing away with allowing you to publicly share docs, so now/soon one can't use Dropbox for hosting static websites anymore.
- stephengillie 10y ago
  Yeah, that's one of the issues I avoid by directly hosting the files, instead of using them as a web host. I'd use Neocities if I didn't have my own server. (My server is just my old gaming PC, on my home internet.)

wishinghand 10y ago

The flat file Kirby CMS is a great option. The starter template has a basic blog implementation, it's easy to start modifying to look like what you want, and it has a basic admin panel for adding new pages/posts that's client friendly, unlike a static site generator. If you're not into making your own theme, there's a site for buying them called getkirby-themes.com which most other flat file CMS options don't have. It used PHP and can run quite quickly if you setup caching and PHP 7 on your host. Content is generated from txt files that can have any number of fields (titles, subtitles, body, asides, meta info, etc). As for ecommerce, I use Ecwid. It's a separate login to manage products, but it's also free for 10 or fewer products. After that it's a very reasonable monthly fee.

TBloom 10y ago

If you're a fan of React, Gatsby is an excellent project to check out: https://github.com/gatsbyjs/gatsby https://github.com/gatsbyjs/gatsby

at-fates-hands 10y ago

All good recommendations here, but I'd add a few more. . I say take a look at Keystone CMS (http://keystonejs.com/ http://keystonejs.com/) - it's a Node based CMS and is really easy to work with and has tons of options to customize as you need it. My other recommendation would be to use Spike - (https://www.spike.cf/ https://www.spike.cf/) (from the same guys who built Roots) along with rooftop CMS (https://www.rooftopcms.com/ https://www.rooftopcms.com/) or Contentful CMS (https://www.contentful.com/ https://www.contentful.com/)

my123 10y ago

Orchard works quite well after it is setted up properly.

zie 10y ago

Sphinx. Lots of documentation uses it, so it can do most anything, plus if you are familiar with Sphinx, you will be hopefully more likely to write your documentation as well :)

koolba 10y ago

Harp is pretty good: https://harpjs.com/ https://harpjs.com/ If you're already comfortable with the node.js world it's easy to hack it if you want to support something new as well. Out of the box it requires very minimal setup to get things going.

pmorici 10y ago

For a small store that is super easy to setup I would use Weebly. You can also do a blog through it.

diegocerdan 10y ago

I'm looking for a CMS that outputs static generated pages with a progressive web app approach. Any references?

kyasui 10y ago

I'm a big fan of SiteLeaf - https://www.siteleaf.com/ https://www.siteleaf.com/ CMS for static sites (Using Jekyll under the hood)

tomw1808 10y ago

Pimcore. https://www.pimcore.org/en https://www.pimcore.org/en

cryptos 10y ago

After testing some static site generators I've settled with Hugo and never looked back. I like especially the fact that I only have a single static file with no further dependencies. And the speed is fantastic. Hot reloading is very useful.

Zelmor 10y ago

I sort of like werc, the framework behind cat-v. I would only imagine it for a personal site/portfolio, however, and not for commercial or business use.

manmal 10y ago

Craft CMS. It allows you to define a meta model in a convenient editor, and lets you render out data with a template engine (HTML/JSON/...). The meta-meta-model consists of a few sensible objects, so it's not just UML rendered down. It has fine grained access control, so you can define which user can access what data. Things like image uploads in the backend (admin) area are solved. E.g you can setup an S3 bucket that is used for your site's dynamic assets. Security updates are one-click-installs and I'd say there is at least one per week. There are plenty of plugins available, too. It's a bit pricey (compared to FOSS) if you use it for clients, but you can develop for free or even host your own website for free with it. I've used it twice so far, and I enjoyed it very much.

galfarragem 10y ago

Is there already a 'Jekyll' on Crystal? Jekyll with hugo speed, that would be awesome!

ctcliff 10y ago

I developed a static site generator for e-commerce called Flatmarket: https://github.com/christophercliff/flatmarket https://github.com/christophercliff/flatmarket It lacks some of the features you'd get with a dedicated backend service but it's truly static and costs about $0.004/transaction on AWS Lambda (not including Stripe's take).

sgallant 10y ago
I love the artwork for your demo site. Where did you get it? https://christophercliff.com/flatmarket/ https://christophercliff.com/flatmarket/
- ctcliff 10y ago
  An old stock art CD-ROM by Redouté.
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yranadive 10y ago

If you just care about hosting code and snippets I'd try GrepPage. It lets you search your stores from the command-line and the web. (Disclaimer I'm the creator of GrepPage).

pwenzel 10y ago

I have grown to love Jade/Pug templates, compiled with npm scripts. You can build your own site generator to convert pug templates with the simple command `pug --watch`.

pvdebbe 10y ago

TextPattern was my favourite back when, even if it featured very awkward ideas (all content, styles, maintenance goes through their web interface to database -- good luck with unix tools to compare, diff and patch changes). These days static content is the only valid answer in my books. I don't want to spend my nights worrying about rotting PHP/Ruby/NodeJS runtimes behind the scenes.

jeshan25 10y ago

Jekyll/Lektor as a static CMS. Deployed to Amazon S3 backed by Cloudfront CDN. All of this gives me: ease of deploy, AWS's reliable infrastructure, ultra fast website (can easily score 90+ out of 100 on google's pagespeed insights tool), delivered over SSL with a free certificate on my own domain, "infinite" scale, etc. All of this can literally run on cents of a dollar per month.

lucabenazzi 10y ago

Webflow + DPD (digital downloads), or Webflow + Shopify (physical goods) If your CMS is not supposed to do anything particularly fancy and if you don't want the annoyance of dealing with techy staff, Webflow is currently the best website builder that I know. It's a visual tool and that saves you lots of time, especially if you are tech savvy. They are just releasing a CMS API that is going to make it even more flexible. If you are selling real goods, Webflow integrates with Shopify very efficiently. If you are selling digital downloads, I'd consider DPD, which is in many ways better for digital downloads since it was born just for to do that. I am currently using it and I am very satisfied.

maxt 10y ago

I love Chyrp[1] but have since moved away from PHP and am looking into static solutions like Jekyll, or Ghost[2]. I always make sure to proxy Ghost through a CDN because it lessens the load on my server. For digital products, I use Sellfy and Selly[#] [1] https://github.com/chyrp/chyrp https://github.com/chyrp/chyrp [2] https://github.com/TryGhost https://github.com/TryGhost [#] https://sellfy.com/ https://sellfy.com/ [#] https://selly.gg/ https://selly.gg/

anngrant 10y ago

Squarespace can be a good alternative to WordPress. Both have the potential to help you create beautiful and powerful websites. Though WordPress is more flexible & customizable especially with plugins. I've just downloaded a cool WP theme for my website - https://www.templatemonster.com/wordpress-themes/monstroid2.html https://www.templatemonster.com/wordpress-themes/monstroid2.... . It's a multipurpose theme that can be used for creating any website you need.