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So one thing I've seen very little of, but have written (to great success), is basically a wordpress/etc scraper. I was lucky in that the site was fully crawlab

So one thing I've seen very little of, but have written (to great success), is basically a wordpress/etc scraper. I was lucky in that the site was fully crawlable, but it meant that the non-technical website editors could edit things easily using a CMS, and then when they were ready, someone could deploy to prod. A CI pipeline would then crawl the site, saving all the generated static files, diff them, and upload only the parts that had changed. It meant that we -never- had naked requests hitting the underlying CMS, so our security footprint there was miniscule (to access it you'd need to already be in the network), there was no chance of failure (i.e., even with a caching layer, a bunch of updates and enough traffic could lead to a spike hitting the CMS, and in fact, if there was a bad edit in the CMS that lead to part of the site being malformed, the crawler would die, alerting us to the bad edits before going live), and we could host using any static site/CDN we wanted to, with the only downside being deploys took a while. Even that downside we could have worked around, if we'd wanted to get into the CMS internals enough to track modifications; we just really didn't want to.

manquer 5y ago
It is easier today, Netlify like apps offer the best of both parts ,integrate SSG to graphical UI. You can add CI pipelines for things like say W3C html validation, translation or WCAG compliance or image/asset optimization (designers sometimes forget), AMP generation, S3/CDN like hosting etc. I was tempted to building something like like you did, but came to the same conclusion many do : it is not our core business and marketing will still have issues as the offering won't be as good as a professional one. Even a solution to bridge the two setups needs dev time to maintain. End of the day managed solutions like Hubspot comes in cheaper in total cost of ownership even though all of this kind of architecture is technically superior.
- gtirloni 5y ago
  That's what we did here. Moved from WordPress to Netlify CMS and Eleventy and users managed fine (I'm told).
  - manquer 5y ago
    Netlify is a good solution, glad that it is getting some love. The move for us was before netlify became popular so never could consider it. That's why I was tempted to build, then I realized bulk of the work will be to build the graphical UI editor and templating tools - the parts I hate to begin with.
- lostcolony 5y ago
  So we were dealing with a Django thing that was a complete cluster of unmaintainable, and it was about 6 years ago, so more limited options than today. It took...maybe 40 man hours to write a script, get it into the build pipeline, and have everything work? A few days for a coupla guys, basically. It would have taken us longer to switch CMSes, just in user training, I suspect.

manquer 5y ago

It is easier today, Netlify like apps offer the best of both parts ,integrate SSG to graphical UI. You can add CI pipelines for things like say W3C html validation, translation or WCAG compliance or image/asset optimization (designers sometimes forget), AMP generation, S3/CDN like hosting etc. I was tempted to building something like like you did, but came to the same conclusion many do : it is not our core business and marketing will still have issues as the offering won't be as good as a professional one. Even a solution to bridge the two setups needs dev time to maintain. End of the day managed solutions like Hubspot comes in cheaper in total cost of ownership even though all of this kind of architecture is technically superior.

gtirloni 5y ago
That's what we did here. Moved from WordPress to Netlify CMS and Eleventy and users managed fine (I'm told).
- manquer 5y ago
  Netlify is a good solution, glad that it is getting some love. The move for us was before netlify became popular so never could consider it. That's why I was tempted to build, then I realized bulk of the work will be to build the graphical UI editor and templating tools - the parts I hate to begin with.
lostcolony 5y ago
So we were dealing with a Django thing that was a complete cluster of unmaintainable, and it was about 6 years ago, so more limited options than today. It took...maybe 40 man hours to write a script, get it into the build pipeline, and have everything work? A few days for a coupla guys, basically. It would have taken us longer to switch CMSes, just in user training, I suspect.