6 ms·

For people recommending static sites to replace WordPress, what do you do if you want to give users a basic page builder in the CMS where you can easily preview

For people recommending static sites to replace WordPress, what do you do if you want to give users a basic page builder in the CMS where you can easily preview the page before it goes live? E.g. bolting together page blocks for testimonials, feature lists and a contact form with some basic customisation like colours and images. Markdown only support is straightforward but most company websites need a bit more than this. Accurate page previews before production deploys is really important too. Open source preferred as well.

hellojere 5y ago
Next.js, and most likely all the big players, can achieve that. I use Prismic for a lot of projects, and here's documentation about how to achieve previews with it and Next.js https://prismic.io/docs/technologies/previews-nextjs https://prismic.io/docs/technologies/previews-nextjs
- post-it 5y ago
  Yeah, easy, all you have to do is rewrite WordPress in JavaScript. Now instead of worrying about malware in plugins, you can worry about malware in plugins and your npm dependencies!
  - fastball 5y ago
    The problem with WP is that its being run in a privileged position. A statically generated site is not.
    - post-it 5y ago
      You shouldn't run your web server as root. I think the most common way of running WordPress is to use nginx in front of Apache, so you can easily run Apache as a special WordPress user for extra security.
      - fastball 5y ago
        Sorry, my terminology wasn't clear. Didn't really mean running it as root, meant that WP has direct access to your DB (it must).
        post-it 5y ago
        Every backend has access to your DB though. If a WordPress alternative supports plugins, it is just as vulnerable. If it doesn't support plugins, it's not a WordPress alternative for most use cases.
    - sdze 5y ago
      you don't run your fpm processes as superuser. In general it is run in a jailed environment.
  - ekianjo 5y ago
    sounds like much worse than wordpress from the get go
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- seanwilson 5y ago
  Is there an open source CMS for this though? Prismic doesn't seem to be: https://prismic.io/faq/product https://prismic.io/faq/product
mateomorris 5y ago
https://primo.af https://primo.af is exactly this. It’s still in Alpha but I’m releasing the Beta within the next few weeks.
- Tepix 5y ago
  The animated headline causes the entire page to jump around on iPhone 13
  - matesz 5y ago
    It probably happens on all mobile devices, I’m using iPhone 12 mini. Very annoying!
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - mateomorris 5y ago
    Hadn’t realized this - thanks for the heads up
- SturgeonsLaw 5y ago
  There's a lot of domain hacks you can do with .af however I imagine the sovereign risk of using a domain controlled by the Taliban would be higher than average
Casteil 5y ago
Ghost - it can be self-hosted, and they provide an official Docker image on Docker Hub https://ghost.org/ https://ghost.org/
- nieve 5y ago
  Ghost is pretty decent, but it ties you to the node/npm upgrade treadmill and has a few weirdnesses like pushing very hard to get people to sign up for Mailgun instead of using their own mail server.
Morgawr 5y ago
> Accurate page previews before production deploys is really important too. Open source preferred as well. I just like to keep it simple and write markdown on a local git repository that is mirrored on github + github pages for viewing (but I'm sure there's other ways to do the same too). You can just commit your changes locally to test that everything works, and then push it to remote and it will get picked up by "production". It works as a single user but I can imagine working for a small team of contributors as well.
PinkPigeon 5y ago
My solution to this is https://pinkpigeon.co.uk https://pinkpigeon.co.uk I built it specifically to address shortfalls of other site builders: - No themes - Uses 'modules' rather than the strangely popular drag and drop thing with blocks and widgets (which then jumble about the page wildly when resizing). We have 40 modules at the moment and I keep building more. - 100% mobile optimised. We hide no functionality and most page editing I tend to do side by side, with the CMS in a separate window next to the preview site - The preview site updates automatically when you hit 'save' so that it can be viewed on many devices in real-time at the same time (and shared easily too) - It's very fast. No React or other shenanigans. There is JS for the more complex interactions, but it's been applied sparingly. Doesn't work without JS though. - Sites are deployed to Cloudflare Workers Sites. The SSG behind the scenes is Hugo I don't advertise this thing anywhere and all my clients are word of mouth. I have yet to hear a single negative thing from anyone. I live in the countryside so my clients are all pensioners who don't know computers. They've all had run-ins with WordPress and naturally hated it. (though I don't want to knock a properly setup WordPress, IMO you have to be technical to do it and my system is aimed specifically at non technical people) I don't do shops and even blogs are probably not directly my target audience. But if you just need to make a simple site with pictures, videos and images (maybe a mailchimp signup, instagram gallery or Google calendar signup or showing some PDF newsletters), then I'd challenge you to do it faster in any other system. I'm doing this on the side, so have no time to build websites, so it takes no time to build websites in my system :) (I've built a lot of websites for free and just end up collecting the hosting charge which is between £8-£13 a month, which is hopefully similar to some sitebuilders, but I can't compete with the £3 per month offerings that tie you into other services and immediately become more expensive as soon as you add any meaningful functionality.) There are about a billion things I want to improve about it of course. It's certainly not perfect, but finding the time is a challenge. I hope to one day be able to make it my full time job.
vanchor3 5y ago
If you're not completely against markdown, I particularly like Grav (https://getgrav.org https://getgrav.org) combined with the optional Admin plugin. Very quick and easy installation; I don't need to keep detailed notes on getting the exact packages loaded to make it work. The admin plugin gets you easy editing capabilities, although you still write in markdown by default it has quick buttons for common markdown and a preview button.
herbst 5y ago
Even Wix has a more user friendly UI builder than wordpress does. Every CMS I tried in the past years did.
chillfox 5y ago
Give them a Wordpress site (on a VPN) that generates a static site.
berkes 5y ago
The same as with any software: a deployment pipeline. Depending on your needs, a staging version can be built and hosted. To be promoted to production once chief editor Acks. Or multiple such versions. You can have multiple stages. Or just one, with a preview on localhost. You can have testsuites crawling a build. Or just a manual quick glance. This problem is not hard. It is, in fact, much simpler to solve with static sites.
- seanwilson 5y ago
  Like say you want to update the heading text and background image for a landing page header and check it looks good on desktop and mobile. Does it line wrap nicely? Maybe bolding some words would look good? Is the text still readable when it overlaps the image? I want to be able to preview and tweak this kind of thing in seconds. What would you use for this? I wouldn't want to wait a minute for Netlify to build and deploy to staging each time for example.
  - berkes 5y ago
    I use jekyll --preview for that. It seems you want to optimize your frontend-work. Tweaking a live setup that goes `client-> CMS -> Database. [switch-tab] [F5-refresh] -> client -> CMS -> Database -> client` is quite certainly not the direction you want to go. Instead, most frontend-development optimizes with things like that jekyll --preview: some devserver that autoreload (and autorefreshes!) your website on change. I now ask you: if you are happy about the changes: How do you save it? How do you reproduce it onto those other two websites? Or, if you were carefull and did the work on test/acceptance/staging, how to reproduce it on production? How do you communicate to your colleagues what has changed? How do you communicate to your future self what you changed? This stuff commonly lives in code, which is version controlled. Having it in a database is suboptimal, for this reason too.
difu_disciple 5y ago
https://wordpress.org/plugins/simply-static/ https://wordpress.org/plugins/simply-static/ Lock down your WP install within your VPC & serve the static pages from S3. If you do have a dedicated engineering team, the trend now is using headless cms (sanity or contentful) and a ssr platform (Next.js or any of the traditional frameworks).

hellojere 5y ago

Next.js, and most likely all the big players, can achieve that. I use Prismic for a lot of projects, and here's documentation about how to achieve previews with it and Next.js https://prismic.io/docs/technologies/previews-nextjs https://prismic.io/docs/technologies/previews-nextjs

post-it 5y ago
Yeah, easy, all you have to do is rewrite WordPress in JavaScript. Now instead of worrying about malware in plugins, you can worry about malware in plugins and your npm dependencies!
- fastball 5y ago
  The problem with WP is that its being run in a privileged position. A statically generated site is not.
  - post-it 5y ago
    You shouldn't run your web server as root. I think the most common way of running WordPress is to use nginx in front of Apache, so you can easily run Apache as a special WordPress user for extra security.
    - fastball 5y ago
      Sorry, my terminology wasn't clear. Didn't really mean running it as root, meant that WP has direct access to your DB (it must).
      - post-it 5y ago
        Every backend has access to your DB though. If a WordPress alternative supports plugins, it is just as vulnerable. If it doesn't support plugins, it's not a WordPress alternative for most use cases.
  - sdze 5y ago
    you don't run your fpm processes as superuser. In general it is run in a jailed environment.
- ekianjo 5y ago
  sounds like much worse than wordpress from the get go
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
seanwilson 5y ago
Is there an open source CMS for this though? Prismic doesn't seem to be: https://prismic.io/faq/product https://prismic.io/faq/product

mateomorris 5y ago

https://primo.af https://primo.af is exactly this. It’s still in Alpha but I’m releasing the Beta within the next few weeks.

Tepix 5y ago
The animated headline causes the entire page to jump around on iPhone 13
- matesz 5y ago
  It probably happens on all mobile devices, I’m using iPhone 12 mini. Very annoying!
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- mateomorris 5y ago
  Hadn’t realized this - thanks for the heads up
SturgeonsLaw 5y ago
There's a lot of domain hacks you can do with .af however I imagine the sovereign risk of using a domain controlled by the Taliban would be higher than average

Casteil 5y ago

Ghost - it can be self-hosted, and they provide an official Docker image on Docker Hub https://ghost.org/ https://ghost.org/

nieve 5y ago
Ghost is pretty decent, but it ties you to the node/npm upgrade treadmill and has a few weirdnesses like pushing very hard to get people to sign up for Mailgun instead of using their own mail server.

Morgawr 5y ago

> Accurate page previews before production deploys is really important too. Open source preferred as well. I just like to keep it simple and write markdown on a local git repository that is mirrored on github + github pages for viewing (but I'm sure there's other ways to do the same too). You can just commit your changes locally to test that everything works, and then push it to remote and it will get picked up by "production". It works as a single user but I can imagine working for a small team of contributors as well.

PinkPigeon 5y ago

My solution to this is https://pinkpigeon.co.uk https://pinkpigeon.co.uk I built it specifically to address shortfalls of other site builders: - No themes - Uses 'modules' rather than the strangely popular drag and drop thing with blocks and widgets (which then jumble about the page wildly when resizing). We have 40 modules at the moment and I keep building more. - 100% mobile optimised. We hide no functionality and most page editing I tend to do side by side, with the CMS in a separate window next to the preview site - The preview site updates automatically when you hit 'save' so that it can be viewed on many devices in real-time at the same time (and shared easily too) - It's very fast. No React or other shenanigans. There is JS for the more complex interactions, but it's been applied sparingly. Doesn't work without JS though. - Sites are deployed to Cloudflare Workers Sites. The SSG behind the scenes is Hugo I don't advertise this thing anywhere and all my clients are word of mouth. I have yet to hear a single negative thing from anyone. I live in the countryside so my clients are all pensioners who don't know computers. They've all had run-ins with WordPress and naturally hated it. (though I don't want to knock a properly setup WordPress, IMO you have to be technical to do it and my system is aimed specifically at non technical people) I don't do shops and even blogs are probably not directly my target audience. But if you just need to make a simple site with pictures, videos and images (maybe a mailchimp signup, instagram gallery or Google calendar signup or showing some PDF newsletters), then I'd challenge you to do it faster in any other system. I'm doing this on the side, so have no time to build websites, so it takes no time to build websites in my system :) (I've built a lot of websites for free and just end up collecting the hosting charge which is between £8-£13 a month, which is hopefully similar to some sitebuilders, but I can't compete with the £3 per month offerings that tie you into other services and immediately become more expensive as soon as you add any meaningful functionality.) There are about a billion things I want to improve about it of course. It's certainly not perfect, but finding the time is a challenge. I hope to one day be able to make it my full time job.

vanchor3 5y ago

If you're not completely against markdown, I particularly like Grav (https://getgrav.org https://getgrav.org) combined with the optional Admin plugin. Very quick and easy installation; I don't need to keep detailed notes on getting the exact packages loaded to make it work. The admin plugin gets you easy editing capabilities, although you still write in markdown by default it has quick buttons for common markdown and a preview button.

herbst 5y ago

Even Wix has a more user friendly UI builder than wordpress does. Every CMS I tried in the past years did.

chillfox 5y ago

Give them a Wordpress site (on a VPN) that generates a static site.

berkes 5y ago

The same as with any software: a deployment pipeline. Depending on your needs, a staging version can be built and hosted. To be promoted to production once chief editor Acks. Or multiple such versions. You can have multiple stages. Or just one, with a preview on localhost. You can have testsuites crawling a build. Or just a manual quick glance. This problem is not hard. It is, in fact, much simpler to solve with static sites.

seanwilson 5y ago
Like say you want to update the heading text and background image for a landing page header and check it looks good on desktop and mobile. Does it line wrap nicely? Maybe bolding some words would look good? Is the text still readable when it overlaps the image? I want to be able to preview and tweak this kind of thing in seconds. What would you use for this? I wouldn't want to wait a minute for Netlify to build and deploy to staging each time for example.
- berkes 5y ago
  I use jekyll --preview for that. It seems you want to optimize your frontend-work. Tweaking a live setup that goes `client-> CMS -> Database. [switch-tab] [F5-refresh] -> client -> CMS -> Database -> client` is quite certainly not the direction you want to go. Instead, most frontend-development optimizes with things like that jekyll --preview: some devserver that autoreload (and autorefreshes!) your website on change. I now ask you: if you are happy about the changes: How do you save it? How do you reproduce it onto those other two websites? Or, if you were carefull and did the work on test/acceptance/staging, how to reproduce it on production? How do you communicate to your colleagues what has changed? How do you communicate to your future self what you changed? This stuff commonly lives in code, which is version controlled. Having it in a database is suboptimal, for this reason too.

difu_disciple 5y ago

https://wordpress.org/plugins/simply-static/ https://wordpress.org/plugins/simply-static/ Lock down your WP install within your VPC & serve the static pages from S3. If you do have a dedicated engineering team, the trend now is using headless cms (sanity or contentful) and a ssr platform (Next.js or any of the traditional frameworks).