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Things I hear CMS developers talking about: Constantly applying security updates. The lack of maintenance on their favourite plugins. Which caching plugins work

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
  - danso 10y ago
    That's true, but if you're a relatively seasoned developer, the ecosystem is stable enough that you can manage. By "stable", I mean, being able to run homebrew and install something like rbenv. I can't remember the last time Jekyll up and failed on me, but for other projects, it's straightforward to blow away a Ruby install and start clean. Admittedly, I'm not sure how easy it is to find canonical Ruby management tutorials when starting out. I think Ruby's system is somewhat simpler than npm, but only because I don't do too much with Ruby and don't often need to change things around.
  - feoyen 10y ago
    After having to "blow it all away and start again" a few times myself, I now use Jekyll via Docker. Jekyll themselves take care of all the dependencies and my machine can stay clean. https://github.com/jekyll/docker/wiki/Usage:-Running https://github.com/jekyll/docker/wiki/Usage:-Running
Artemis2 10y ago
I'd take a look at https://forestry.io https://forestry.io as a good crossroads between static sites and a full-fledged CMS
djsumdog 10y ago
I run Jekyll as well. It's alright for developers. Liquid templates are terrible (you can have invalid filters, use tags that aren't defined and it's all arbitrary on which one of those things will cause an error and which won't). I had to write a plug-in to be able to get it to support multiple sites: https://github.com/sumdog/jekyll-multisite/ https://github.com/sumdog/jekyll-multisite/ (I'm working on getting tests setup in containers so I can support multiple Jekyll versions and accept pull requests). If you're starting from scratch, I'm not sure if I'd suggest Jekyll today. I mean it still works for me, but the path has been frustrating and I've found a lot of limitations with it. I wrote a lot of custom ruby plugins to get what I wanted out of it. I've used Middleman on another project, which was decent, but at the time it lacks some of the more complicated templating Jekyll has. It may have improved since then. I briefly looked at Hugo. It looks interesting and is worth checking out as well.
- joemaller1 10y ago
  agreed about Liquid templates, it's extremely limiting after working with Jinja/Nunjucks/Twig.
therealmarv 10y ago
Add one or two requirements: Multi-User Blogposting for non tech aware people.
- halomru 10y ago
  In that case Jekyll or Middleman are not the implementations you want, but static site generators still work. There are various solutions with WordPress-like admin backends that produce static pages for the frontend.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - icebraining 10y ago
    Is there any that is decent yet cheap? I've trying to find one for the small non-profit I help, but the open source implementations I found were at the toy stage (couldn't even embed a video) or Movable Type, which sounds great but at a price of $999, it's about $969 above what they can afford.
    - therealmarv 10y ago
      Embedding video should be at that price level something like: Upload to Youtube, copy embed code into your YourPageGeneratorNameHere nearly all open source page generators I know support this. You maybe want to look into known very easy solutions like wordpress.com blogger etc. ?!
      - icebraining 10y ago
        Having to mess directly with HTML is too risky. Maybe it could work if it had a really easy to use version control, but I've never seen that either. Wordpress.com is expensive if you want "advanced" features like editing the CSS(!). As for Blogger, I don't want to tie them to a proprietary solution.
        10y ago
rtpg 10y ago
The nice thing about things like WordPress is that "non-tech" people can be using it as well. Jekyll can easily be broken, and suddenly someone who just wanted to write a new blog post for your company's marketing site accidentally removed all analytics cookies.
- amorphid 10y ago
  One of my old employers has a monolithic Rails app for their backed, and that includes the company's corporate website. Kind of crazy to think that the marketing people and the application developers are both making commits to the same code base. Awesome, but also crazy.
- illuminea 10y ago
  That's why WordPress is still growing, and isn't going anywhere anytime soon. The problem is that while non-tech users like it, tech users increasingly don't. That's what we're hoping to solve with Strattic: https://strattic.com https://strattic.com.
berns 10y ago
I understand most people's enthusiasm with static site generators. But either they are only building sites for themselves or their clients are very different than mines. How do your clients edit the site? How do they do simple things like cropping images for example? And what about forms, newsletter subscribe forms or contact forms? Do you use a third party service for everything? I can't see how that is simpler or more reliable.
- ascendantlogic 10y ago
  The omnipresent pitfall of engineers: Assuming that all end users share your knowledge and skills.
  - technion 10y ago
    I look at it the other way around. The assumption that Wordpress means a client can edit their own site has been very wrong, for many users. Unless the site is built in Microsoft Word (and I've seen that done..) they are going to be using a professional for edits, and hence I refer back to static builders.
    - illuminea 10y ago
      That's why we are developing Strattic, which is a static publishing sites for the popular CMSs like WordPress. This way end-users who aren't techy can continue to manage their sites in our secure staging area, and the site is then published live as static. Our company site is running on our platform - the origin site is WordPress: https://strattic.com https://strattic.com. I'd love to hear feedback, and we're also looking for beta testers.
- ufmace 10y ago
  That's what I thought. I like Jekyll fine for my personal blog, but I don't see how you could ever set up a non-technical client with it.
- dkuntz2 10y ago
  While it's obviously not the best solution, and not something that everyone would want to do, I started creating an application just so that other people could edit a static site. It gives them a basic editor, abstracts away frontmatter, and can generate the new site from updated content. I definitely have some regrets from this approach instead of just picking a CMS that already exists, and if I were in a similar situation in the future I'd probably start comparing preexisting CMS options.

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
- danso 10y ago
  That's true, but if you're a relatively seasoned developer, the ecosystem is stable enough that you can manage. By "stable", I mean, being able to run homebrew and install something like rbenv. I can't remember the last time Jekyll up and failed on me, but for other projects, it's straightforward to blow away a Ruby install and start clean. Admittedly, I'm not sure how easy it is to find canonical Ruby management tutorials when starting out. I think Ruby's system is somewhat simpler than npm, but only because I don't do too much with Ruby and don't often need to change things around.
- feoyen 10y ago
  After having to "blow it all away and start again" a few times myself, I now use Jekyll via Docker. Jekyll themselves take care of all the dependencies and my machine can stay clean. https://github.com/jekyll/docker/wiki/Usage:-Running https://github.com/jekyll/docker/wiki/Usage:-Running

Artemis2 10y ago

I'd take a look at https://forestry.io https://forestry.io as a good crossroads between static sites and a full-fledged CMS

djsumdog 10y ago

I run Jekyll as well. It's alright for developers. Liquid templates are terrible (you can have invalid filters, use tags that aren't defined and it's all arbitrary on which one of those things will cause an error and which won't). I had to write a plug-in to be able to get it to support multiple sites: https://github.com/sumdog/jekyll-multisite/ https://github.com/sumdog/jekyll-multisite/ (I'm working on getting tests setup in containers so I can support multiple Jekyll versions and accept pull requests). If you're starting from scratch, I'm not sure if I'd suggest Jekyll today. I mean it still works for me, but the path has been frustrating and I've found a lot of limitations with it. I wrote a lot of custom ruby plugins to get what I wanted out of it. I've used Middleman on another project, which was decent, but at the time it lacks some of the more complicated templating Jekyll has. It may have improved since then. I briefly looked at Hugo. It looks interesting and is worth checking out as well.

joemaller1 10y ago
agreed about Liquid templates, it's extremely limiting after working with Jinja/Nunjucks/Twig.

therealmarv 10y ago

Add one or two requirements: Multi-User Blogposting for non tech aware people.

halomru 10y ago
In that case Jekyll or Middleman are not the implementations you want, but static site generators still work. There are various solutions with WordPress-like admin backends that produce static pages for the frontend.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- icebraining 10y ago
  Is there any that is decent yet cheap? I've trying to find one for the small non-profit I help, but the open source implementations I found were at the toy stage (couldn't even embed a video) or Movable Type, which sounds great but at a price of $999, it's about $969 above what they can afford.
  - therealmarv 10y ago
    Embedding video should be at that price level something like: Upload to Youtube, copy embed code into your YourPageGeneratorNameHere nearly all open source page generators I know support this. You maybe want to look into known very easy solutions like wordpress.com blogger etc. ?!
    - icebraining 10y ago
      Having to mess directly with HTML is too risky. Maybe it could work if it had a really easy to use version control, but I've never seen that either. Wordpress.com is expensive if you want "advanced" features like editing the CSS(!). As for Blogger, I don't want to tie them to a proprietary solution.
      - 10y ago

rtpg 10y ago

The nice thing about things like WordPress is that "non-tech" people can be using it as well. Jekyll can easily be broken, and suddenly someone who just wanted to write a new blog post for your company's marketing site accidentally removed all analytics cookies.

amorphid 10y ago
One of my old employers has a monolithic Rails app for their backed, and that includes the company's corporate website. Kind of crazy to think that the marketing people and the application developers are both making commits to the same code base. Awesome, but also crazy.
illuminea 10y ago
That's why WordPress is still growing, and isn't going anywhere anytime soon. The problem is that while non-tech users like it, tech users increasingly don't. That's what we're hoping to solve with Strattic: https://strattic.com https://strattic.com.

berns 10y ago

I understand most people's enthusiasm with static site generators. But either they are only building sites for themselves or their clients are very different than mines. How do your clients edit the site? How do they do simple things like cropping images for example? And what about forms, newsletter subscribe forms or contact forms? Do you use a third party service for everything? I can't see how that is simpler or more reliable.

ascendantlogic 10y ago
The omnipresent pitfall of engineers: Assuming that all end users share your knowledge and skills.
- technion 10y ago
  I look at it the other way around. The assumption that Wordpress means a client can edit their own site has been very wrong, for many users. Unless the site is built in Microsoft Word (and I've seen that done..) they are going to be using a professional for edits, and hence I refer back to static builders.
  - illuminea 10y ago
    That's why we are developing Strattic, which is a static publishing sites for the popular CMSs like WordPress. This way end-users who aren't techy can continue to manage their sites in our secure staging area, and the site is then published live as static. Our company site is running on our platform - the origin site is WordPress: https://strattic.com https://strattic.com. I'd love to hear feedback, and we're also looking for beta testers.
ufmace 10y ago
That's what I thought. I like Jekyll fine for my personal blog, but I don't see how you could ever set up a non-technical client with it.
dkuntz2 10y ago
While it's obviously not the best solution, and not something that everyone would want to do, I started creating an application just so that other people could edit a static site. It gives them a basic editor, abstracts away frontmatter, and can generate the new site from updated content. I definitely have some regrets from this approach instead of just picking a CMS that already exists, and if I were in a similar situation in the future I'd probably start comparing preexisting CMS options.