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Hey HN, it’s been about three years since you sent my open source CMS, Primo, to the front page (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23820201 https://news.ycom

Hey HN, it’s been about three years since you sent my open source CMS, Primo, to the front page (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23820201 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23820201), inspiring me to quit my cushy remote job at the height of the pandemic to work on it full-time (naive and impulsive, I agree). Life has been pretty interesting since then. I’ve burned through my savings, lost my primo.af domain name to the Taliban, and convinced my wife to become a dev/designer to help me. But I’m proud of what we’ve built over that time, and seeing the incredible effect it’s had on people learning web development, putting up personal websites, and managing client sites has further solidified our belief in the power and simplicity of this approach. Today we’re excited to announce the public beta for Primo version 2, which introduces full on-page content editing, page building, and more. I initially created Primo because I was fed up with building websites, and the nontechnical people I was building them for struggled to manage them. My freelance projects involved brittle WordPress themes and poking around dashboards and juggling plugins; accessing the site’s code was so complex that it wasn’t even in the question. As an agency dev, I experienced the complexity of building custom sites in monolithic CMSs and the heavy-handedness of using meta-frameworks and headless CMSs for landing pages and brochure sites. And as a coding instructor, I saw my students face the daunting landscape that people learning to leverage the web face today - CLIs and APIs, package managers and bundlers, frameworks and meta-frameworks . No approach existed that provided a streamlined and approachable path to building, managing, developing, and hosting websites - particularly for common websites (i.e. 90% of the internet) like blogs, landing pages, and brochure sites. Primo is our attempt to build that tool. At a basic level, Primo is a CMS - it gives you the ability to easily manage website content - but its functionality includes the other concerns that also go into running a website, like page building, code editing, static site generation, and deploying to Github/hosting. Blocks are written in Svelte (i.e. HTML, CSS, and JS), so they’re reactive and style-encapsulated. By combining all these elements into a single interface, you can create, manage, modify, and deploy new websites in a fraction of the time. And since they’re static sites, you get all the cost, security, scaling, and speed benefits of serverless too. Primo isn’t intended for people that prefer the WYSIWYG design controls of SquareWixFlow but instead for anybody who wants to leverage HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to fully control and customize their websites while providing a dead-simple content editing experience to themselves and their nontechnical friends/clients/collaborators. It’s for people who feel frustrated by no-code tools and proprietary platforms, and those who want something simpler that still offers the power of code. Beyond that, Primo is an effort to keep the web in the hands of individuals. Our hope is that providing a more approachable tool for web publishing will move the needle on technical literacy and put free expression on the web in the grasp of anyone who wants it so they can’t be as readily corralled into black boxes and walled gardens. If you’d like to be a part of that mission, or just want an easier way to build websites, I hope you'll consider Primo. Mateo

swyx 3y ago
so, so excited to see you on the front page again Mateo! you're succeeding in an incredibly tough market which takes the full set of founder skills to execute. congrats!
- mmmateo 3y ago
  thanks so much swyx!
p-e-w 3y ago
> lost my primo.af domain name to the Taliban I had no idea it used to be possible to register Afghan domain names from outside of Afghanistan.
leokeba 3y ago
Hi Mateo, nice to see the project is still alive and evolving. I personally tried it about a year ago, and I found it really good for designing simple web pages with reusable and customisable components. But the content management system was the issue for me, I was hoping there would be a way to just drop markdown files in a folder for it to generate articles or blog posts following a template like a regular SSG. We even talked about it briefly, and I then forked the primo repo and started implementing a custom method to convert the database entries into a files / folder structure, which was going alright but the reverse operation seemed tricky to implement and I ended up going down another road, building my own custom markdown SSG inspired by this guide : https://joshcollinsworth.com/blog/build-static-sveltekit-markdown-blog https://joshcollinsworth.com/blog/build-static-sveltekit-mar... Anyway, my use case is probably not the one you are targeting, but I still think it would be a dope product if everything worked the same but instead of writing the project into a database it would be a dynamic files / folder structure that could be edited and versioned like a regular sveltekit project. Basically it would be a svelte-based SSG framework with a components library and a dedicated UI to complement the regular text editor. Just dropping this in case someone reads it and wants to build it, keep up the good work.
- mmmateo 3y ago
  Thanks! I could definitely see the value in that. Once we make it possible to fetch content dynamically it should be easy to fetch Markdown from a repo and render it anywhere on the page. Or it might be simpler to keep SvelteKit/Astro for that since it does it so well and just use Primo for the non-blog pages, which is currently possible.

swyx 3y ago

so, so excited to see you on the front page again Mateo! you're succeeding in an incredibly tough market which takes the full set of founder skills to execute. congrats!

mmmateo 3y ago
thanks so much swyx!

p-e-w 3y ago

> lost my primo.af domain name to the Taliban I had no idea it used to be possible to register Afghan domain names from outside of Afghanistan.

leokeba 3y ago

Hi Mateo, nice to see the project is still alive and evolving. I personally tried it about a year ago, and I found it really good for designing simple web pages with reusable and customisable components. But the content management system was the issue for me, I was hoping there would be a way to just drop markdown files in a folder for it to generate articles or blog posts following a template like a regular SSG. We even talked about it briefly, and I then forked the primo repo and started implementing a custom method to convert the database entries into a files / folder structure, which was going alright but the reverse operation seemed tricky to implement and I ended up going down another road, building my own custom markdown SSG inspired by this guide : https://joshcollinsworth.com/blog/build-static-sveltekit-markdown-blog https://joshcollinsworth.com/blog/build-static-sveltekit-mar... Anyway, my use case is probably not the one you are targeting, but I still think it would be a dope product if everything worked the same but instead of writing the project into a database it would be a dynamic files / folder structure that could be edited and versioned like a regular sveltekit project. Basically it would be a svelte-based SSG framework with a components library and a dedicated UI to complement the regular text editor. Just dropping this in case someone reads it and wants to build it, keep up the good work.

mmmateo 3y ago
Thanks! I could definitely see the value in that. Once we make it possible to fetch content dynamically it should be easy to fetch Markdown from a repo and render it anywhere on the page. Or it might be simpler to keep SvelteKit/Astro for that since it does it so well and just use Primo for the non-blog pages, which is currently possible.