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We host high target content (politician sites + dns + email) and I've been moving to static html on siloed s3+cloudfront when clients dont need to use cms thems

We host high target content (politician sites + dns + email) and I've been moving to static html on siloed s3+cloudfront when clients dont need to use cms themselves. It's also much less bloated with a goal of really fast load times on mobile. The problem is of course most of our staff - and definitely all of our clients that want to be able to edit themselves - still rely on WordPress and worse a bunch of plugins that are impossible to lock down. I've wondered if others have setup WordPress in a separate environment to let clients do what they want and then host the static html elsewhere. Like maybe wp-supercache could give a zip download of the static content.

ryanSrich 9y ago
Why not just use contentful (linked article is written by contentful) + static gen? My company has used contentful + middleman for almost 2 years now. It took a while to hone in (payloads used to be extremely large), but once it's dialed, the experience is better than WP for both writers and designers.
- dillondoyle 9y ago
  I haven't looked into it more than the five minutes surfing around after reading this article, so maybe I should look into it more. It was hard to find info on their visual cms like editor in the few minutes I poked around Contentful's site. Maybe their CMS like editor is really simple/similar to wordpress I will read some more. Another quick thought is wordpress has a huge amount of plugins that these non-technical clients are used to, so probably some retooling would be needed to reproduce what they want. I have no problem creating and updating static sites myself so the only need really is to provide clients a way to add content and mess around with site through a visual cms (e.g. use a visual editor plugin to add new slideshow type content and change layouts).
- petepete 9y ago
  Without wanting to plug my own software too much too soon, I've been building a self-hosted static publishing CMS (that sits on top of a git repository rather than a database). Not ready for prime time just yet, but getting there https://www.graphia.co.uk https://www.graphia.co.uk
filleokus 9y ago
> I've wondered if others have setup WordPress in a separate environment to let clients do what they want and then host the static html elsewhere. Like maybe wp-supercache could give a zip download of the static content. I was looking into this recently and seemed like Simply Static[0] was something that could be used for this, as per something like this writeup[1]. I never tried it out, but I think it could be really powerful. Limitations are of course stuff like forms, which made it less useful for me than I first realised. I guess one could use some other form-service which is implemented with js, or maybe there are some plugins available which implements forms with js. [0]: https://wordpress.org/plugins/simply-static/ https://wordpress.org/plugins/simply-static/ [1]: https://medium.com/@elmikewalsh/wordpress-my-favorite-static-site-generator-c6faebf99096 https://medium.com/@elmikewalsh/wordpress-my-favorite-static...
redbeard0x0a 9y ago
I think more people need to know about tools like https://forestry.io/ https://forestry.io/ - it is a way to have an end user update content, it gets committed to github/gitlab/bitbucket and then you could have it deployed on a commit hook or via forestry.

ryanSrich 9y ago

Why not just use contentful (linked article is written by contentful) + static gen? My company has used contentful + middleman for almost 2 years now. It took a while to hone in (payloads used to be extremely large), but once it's dialed, the experience is better than WP for both writers and designers.

dillondoyle 9y ago
I haven't looked into it more than the five minutes surfing around after reading this article, so maybe I should look into it more. It was hard to find info on their visual cms like editor in the few minutes I poked around Contentful's site. Maybe their CMS like editor is really simple/similar to wordpress I will read some more. Another quick thought is wordpress has a huge amount of plugins that these non-technical clients are used to, so probably some retooling would be needed to reproduce what they want. I have no problem creating and updating static sites myself so the only need really is to provide clients a way to add content and mess around with site through a visual cms (e.g. use a visual editor plugin to add new slideshow type content and change layouts).
petepete 9y ago
Without wanting to plug my own software too much too soon, I've been building a self-hosted static publishing CMS (that sits on top of a git repository rather than a database). Not ready for prime time just yet, but getting there https://www.graphia.co.uk https://www.graphia.co.uk

filleokus 9y ago

> I've wondered if others have setup WordPress in a separate environment to let clients do what they want and then host the static html elsewhere. Like maybe wp-supercache could give a zip download of the static content. I was looking into this recently and seemed like Simply Static[0] was something that could be used for this, as per something like this writeup[1]. I never tried it out, but I think it could be really powerful. Limitations are of course stuff like forms, which made it less useful for me than I first realised. I guess one could use some other form-service which is implemented with js, or maybe there are some plugins available which implements forms with js. [0]: https://wordpress.org/plugins/simply-static/ https://wordpress.org/plugins/simply-static/ [1]: https://medium.com/@elmikewalsh/wordpress-my-favorite-static-site-generator-c6faebf99096 https://medium.com/@elmikewalsh/wordpress-my-favorite-static...

redbeard0x0a 9y ago

I think more people need to know about tools like https://forestry.io/ https://forestry.io/ - it is a way to have an end user update content, it gets committed to github/gitlab/bitbucket and then you could have it deployed on a commit hook or via forestry.