5 ms·

Hopefully many sites will switch to a static site generator like Hugo or Zola. Way lower costs, lower risk of being hacked (almost impossible actually), and a r

Hopefully many sites will switch to a static site generator like Hugo or Zola. Way lower costs, lower risk of being hacked (almost impossible actually), and a reliable backup thanks to Git. I’m running multiple static sites for years already and am very happy with it. It has been very reliable.

Dalewyn 2y ago
>switch to a static site generator like Hugo or Zola At that point just write your own HTML and never be beholden to some abstraction framework toolkit corporation cooperative ever again.
- hu3 2y ago
  Soon enough AI will write most of blog/marketing HTML.
  - labster 2y ago
    And then we can develop systems that save user prompts, automatically and dynamically regenerating page content as the AI models are updated.
    - hu3 2y ago
      Add simple version control to keep history of changes. Slap some workflow/approval process. And you have a product!
      - 9dev 2y ago
        Amazing. You just ruined the internet for everyone, making us all wade through heaps of meaningless bullshit, only generated to drive the ad revenue! And do you know what’s the best part about that? You even made money off of that you can use to purchase the stuff you got ads for! Isn’t that exciting? Thank you for your service!
        hu3 2y ago
        Yeah I'm sure my 3 line comment is to blame for whatever damage AI does to the internet. I'll take the compliment anyway :)
- boscillator 2y ago
  I find markdown to be a more productive way to write prose than HTML. It also shouldn't be too hard to port from one generator to another, given that the content is just markdown.
  - withinboredom 2y ago
    it isn't "just" markdown though. "top matter" and custom html tags and custom htm in-general kinda breaks the appeal.
- akho 2y ago
  Have you tried maintaining a blog with plain hand-written HTML? You need, at the least, single post pages (for permalinks), an index page, and an RSS feed — all slightly different views of the same content. It gets messy, and at some point you write your own SSG, which somehow becomes worse. This is without going into how you ideally want an image pipeline, sitemaps, cards for twitter and stuff, maybe category pages, …
  - Dalewyn 2y ago
    >Have you tried maintaining a blog with plain hand-written HTML? Yes. It's all a lot simpler than dealing with some abstraction framework toolkit, at least for me. Maybe it's because I learned to write websites in the early 2000s where writing your own HTML and CSS was par for the course. You'd also write PHP or Ruby or ASP or something if you wanted to get fancy.
    - akho 2y ago
      It's certainly easier until you have to deal with different views of the same content. I do not trust myself to keep things consistent, and neither should you. Back in the day I'd have clobbered something together with SSIs to have, at least, a single copy of text to maintain, but that gets old quickly. A determined and focused person can probably make do with single-post pages and a titles-only styled rss. Hugo and Zola serve a wider audience.
      - Dalewyn 2y ago
        >It's certainly easier until you have to deal with different views of the same content. I do not trust myself to keep things consistent, and neither should you. I would argue that's not a "static" website, but even so that's still nothing some smart usage of PHP includes or the like can't easily solve.
        akho 2y ago
        The whole point of ssg is to run those "PHP includes" once.
- carlosjobim 2y ago
  You are completely right and the people down voting you are severely deranged. A HTML site + a wysiwyg solution like Surreal CMS is miles better than any site generators, easy to use for the client, and dirt cheap.
lbhdc 2y ago
I think the popularity of Wordpress comes from the access it gives to non-technical people (plus ecosystem). I am sure someone is smart enough to write a CMS that can effectively do that under the hood, but I don't think it matters to the people who choose Wordpress.
- hombre_fatal 2y ago
  Also, Wordpress already can generate a static site.
- jzb 2y ago
  I use Hugo for my own site, now, but it's not a WordPress replacement for a lot of use cases. A single techie's personal blog? Sure. A small company that has five or six people who have to post to a website? No. An organization that wants to integrate a sales cart and such, without a full-time developer? Absolutely no. Until last September I used to encourage non-tech folks to just use WordPress.com and pay for the hosting. It was pricier than DIY solutions, but also I was happy to suggest it to help put $$$ in Automattic's pockets for WordPress development. I'm sad I can't recommend it in good faith anymore.
jazzyjackson 2y ago
The principal use of Wordpress IME experience is so people can add content without learning markdown and git and so on
- woleium 2y ago
  With AI that is now possible without wordpress
  - ben_w 2y ago
    Kinda yeah, but with a lot of caveats. AI output is in a frustrating half way place where the results are simultaneously better than an amateur and worse than someone with a few years of professional experience. Makes it very tempting to use, but unless you're good at attention to detail and reviewing the output, it's also by default[0] producing certain tells that make many people very weary — think of the meme "if you didn't bother to write it, why should I bother to read it". [0] you can get past this fairly easily, but IMO learning that is a skill that only comes to the kind of technical person who would also not have any trouble learning the markup/markdown anyway
  - jazzyjackson 2y ago
    For a subset, sure, the main barrier to entry is people believing themselves capable of following instructions and caring enough to invest the time. AI enables some people to believe in themselves, but most still won't care enough if there exists another option where they can just login to a web front end and "add post" (granted, GitHub lets you do this too, edit a repo from the front end and add a file, I suspect a GitHub action can be triggered to rebuild a static site from there, then you have free, unhackableish, high performance hosting, but theres still a few concepts to learn, especially wrt DNS, and you don't get any analytics or the e-commerce obviously. Squarespace and Shopify will continue being profitable despite certain things becoming a little easier.
  - daedrdev 2y ago
    Ai is less useful for those people because they cant tell if its right or wrong output
claudiulodro 2y ago
Sure, some of the web is read-only, but what about commenting, contact forms, forums, eCommerce or anything else that requires a proper server? That's a big advantage WP and other full CMS have over static site generators.
- xp84 2y ago
  A lot of corpsites are wordpress, and are modified once a quarter or so, those should not be running wordpress internet-facing due to its terrible performance and constant susceptibility to vulnerabilities (or that of its themes/plugins landscape due to it being all pure PHP that can do anything). Wordpress is a useful tool to generate static sites though, I've done that before and it's glorious. Use all the friendly authoring tools of WP and then click a button to write out an updated blob of HTML files to be served by Cloudflare or whatever. As for forums, those almost don't exist anymore, and contact forms and ecommerce are better off being handled by software designed to do that rather than some plugin shoehorned into an early-2000s PHP blogging platform. For example, contact forms in Hubspot or Salesforce, and ecommerce with Shopify. Edit to add: If someone's technical enough to be self-hosting Wordpress the open-source project, I would trust them to do a fine job at selecting a more focused alternative OSS project for those "actual server" needs.
  - radium3d 2y ago
    Gravity forms is actually quite an amazing form system. Do you have another that handles repeater fields and all the rest with a great ux?
- carlosjobim 2y ago
  Every ecommerce requirement is better served by iframes than by WordPress plugins.
  - debesyla 2y ago
    Sorry, how would shopping cart (list of products to be soon bought) in an iframe is "better" than outputting it straight to the page HTML? Wouldn't it make it hard to design it?
disiplus 2y ago
The benefit of WP is the huge theme and plugin ecosystem. I know of people that started a business just on WP + theme + plugin without any dev expirience or money for a developer
- xp84 2y ago
  This is basically true, though I'd point out that most of those themes and plugins are hot garbage minefields full of bugs and security vulns, and due to the fact that it's all just wild-west PHP here, a nontechnical WP admin actually making use of the whole wide world of plugins and themes out there is exactly as safe as downloading absolutely any .exe you want while running Windows XP as Administrator without any firewall or antivirus software. Not disputing the usefulness of the platform, just that it's a risky thing to expose to the Internet.
  - radium3d 2y ago
    But Wordpress.org actually contains a well reviewed library of the plugins where the review scores and reviews are actually helpful and have the support forum right there as well. It’s going to be the most difficult part to “fork”
Saris 2y ago
I don't think many will, those are far too difficult to use compared to WP which most people use because its so easy.
jdeibele 2y ago
I set up several websites for non-profits of various types. The thing that WordPress.com has going for it is better security (updates applied promptly), lower pricing than dedicated WP accounts at DreamHost, etc. (typically these kind of providers low-ball the first year), usable by non-technical users, etc. Trying to teach people to use Git to push an update seems difficult. And teaching them Markdown. And dealing with images. someorg.wordpress.com is not as nice as someorg.com but there's no domain to be not renewed. There's levels of privileges, etc.
graypegg 2y ago
Ive got Jekyll sites from over a decade ago still buildable and kicking! Hard to beat the stability of simple software that outputs static web assets.

Dalewyn 2y ago

>switch to a static site generator like Hugo or Zola At that point just write your own HTML and never be beholden to some abstraction framework toolkit corporation cooperative ever again.

hu3 2y ago
Soon enough AI will write most of blog/marketing HTML.
- labster 2y ago
  And then we can develop systems that save user prompts, automatically and dynamically regenerating page content as the AI models are updated.
  - hu3 2y ago
    Add simple version control to keep history of changes. Slap some workflow/approval process. And you have a product!
    - 9dev 2y ago
      Amazing. You just ruined the internet for everyone, making us all wade through heaps of meaningless bullshit, only generated to drive the ad revenue! And do you know what’s the best part about that? You even made money off of that you can use to purchase the stuff you got ads for! Isn’t that exciting? Thank you for your service!
      - hu3 2y ago
        Yeah I'm sure my 3 line comment is to blame for whatever damage AI does to the internet. I'll take the compliment anyway :)
boscillator 2y ago
I find markdown to be a more productive way to write prose than HTML. It also shouldn't be too hard to port from one generator to another, given that the content is just markdown.
- withinboredom 2y ago
  it isn't "just" markdown though. "top matter" and custom html tags and custom htm in-general kinda breaks the appeal.
akho 2y ago
Have you tried maintaining a blog with plain hand-written HTML? You need, at the least, single post pages (for permalinks), an index page, and an RSS feed — all slightly different views of the same content. It gets messy, and at some point you write your own SSG, which somehow becomes worse. This is without going into how you ideally want an image pipeline, sitemaps, cards for twitter and stuff, maybe category pages, …
- Dalewyn 2y ago
  >Have you tried maintaining a blog with plain hand-written HTML? Yes. It's all a lot simpler than dealing with some abstraction framework toolkit, at least for me. Maybe it's because I learned to write websites in the early 2000s where writing your own HTML and CSS was par for the course. You'd also write PHP or Ruby or ASP or something if you wanted to get fancy.
  - akho 2y ago
    It's certainly easier until you have to deal with different views of the same content. I do not trust myself to keep things consistent, and neither should you. Back in the day I'd have clobbered something together with SSIs to have, at least, a single copy of text to maintain, but that gets old quickly. A determined and focused person can probably make do with single-post pages and a titles-only styled rss. Hugo and Zola serve a wider audience.
    - Dalewyn 2y ago
      >It's certainly easier until you have to deal with different views of the same content. I do not trust myself to keep things consistent, and neither should you. I would argue that's not a "static" website, but even so that's still nothing some smart usage of PHP includes or the like can't easily solve.
      - akho 2y ago
        The whole point of ssg is to run those "PHP includes" once.
carlosjobim 2y ago
You are completely right and the people down voting you are severely deranged. A HTML site + a wysiwyg solution like Surreal CMS is miles better than any site generators, easy to use for the client, and dirt cheap.

lbhdc 2y ago

I think the popularity of Wordpress comes from the access it gives to non-technical people (plus ecosystem). I am sure someone is smart enough to write a CMS that can effectively do that under the hood, but I don't think it matters to the people who choose Wordpress.

hombre_fatal 2y ago
Also, Wordpress already can generate a static site.
jzb 2y ago
I use Hugo for my own site, now, but it's not a WordPress replacement for a lot of use cases. A single techie's personal blog? Sure. A small company that has five or six people who have to post to a website? No. An organization that wants to integrate a sales cart and such, without a full-time developer? Absolutely no. Until last September I used to encourage non-tech folks to just use WordPress.com and pay for the hosting. It was pricier than DIY solutions, but also I was happy to suggest it to help put $$$ in Automattic's pockets for WordPress development. I'm sad I can't recommend it in good faith anymore.

jazzyjackson 2y ago

The principal use of Wordpress IME experience is so people can add content without learning markdown and git and so on

woleium 2y ago
With AI that is now possible without wordpress
- ben_w 2y ago
  Kinda yeah, but with a lot of caveats. AI output is in a frustrating half way place where the results are simultaneously better than an amateur and worse than someone with a few years of professional experience. Makes it very tempting to use, but unless you're good at attention to detail and reviewing the output, it's also by default[0] producing certain tells that make many people very weary — think of the meme "if you didn't bother to write it, why should I bother to read it". [0] you can get past this fairly easily, but IMO learning that is a skill that only comes to the kind of technical person who would also not have any trouble learning the markup/markdown anyway
- jazzyjackson 2y ago
  For a subset, sure, the main barrier to entry is people believing themselves capable of following instructions and caring enough to invest the time. AI enables some people to believe in themselves, but most still won't care enough if there exists another option where they can just login to a web front end and "add post" (granted, GitHub lets you do this too, edit a repo from the front end and add a file, I suspect a GitHub action can be triggered to rebuild a static site from there, then you have free, unhackableish, high performance hosting, but theres still a few concepts to learn, especially wrt DNS, and you don't get any analytics or the e-commerce obviously. Squarespace and Shopify will continue being profitable despite certain things becoming a little easier.
- daedrdev 2y ago
  Ai is less useful for those people because they cant tell if its right or wrong output

claudiulodro 2y ago

Sure, some of the web is read-only, but what about commenting, contact forms, forums, eCommerce or anything else that requires a proper server? That's a big advantage WP and other full CMS have over static site generators.

xp84 2y ago
A lot of corpsites are wordpress, and are modified once a quarter or so, those should not be running wordpress internet-facing due to its terrible performance and constant susceptibility to vulnerabilities (or that of its themes/plugins landscape due to it being all pure PHP that can do anything). Wordpress is a useful tool to generate static sites though, I've done that before and it's glorious. Use all the friendly authoring tools of WP and then click a button to write out an updated blob of HTML files to be served by Cloudflare or whatever. As for forums, those almost don't exist anymore, and contact forms and ecommerce are better off being handled by software designed to do that rather than some plugin shoehorned into an early-2000s PHP blogging platform. For example, contact forms in Hubspot or Salesforce, and ecommerce with Shopify. Edit to add: If someone's technical enough to be self-hosting Wordpress the open-source project, I would trust them to do a fine job at selecting a more focused alternative OSS project for those "actual server" needs.
- radium3d 2y ago
  Gravity forms is actually quite an amazing form system. Do you have another that handles repeater fields and all the rest with a great ux?
carlosjobim 2y ago
Every ecommerce requirement is better served by iframes than by WordPress plugins.
- debesyla 2y ago
  Sorry, how would shopping cart (list of products to be soon bought) in an iframe is "better" than outputting it straight to the page HTML? Wouldn't it make it hard to design it?

disiplus 2y ago

The benefit of WP is the huge theme and plugin ecosystem. I know of people that started a business just on WP + theme + plugin without any dev expirience or money for a developer

xp84 2y ago
This is basically true, though I'd point out that most of those themes and plugins are hot garbage minefields full of bugs and security vulns, and due to the fact that it's all just wild-west PHP here, a nontechnical WP admin actually making use of the whole wide world of plugins and themes out there is exactly as safe as downloading absolutely any .exe you want while running Windows XP as Administrator without any firewall or antivirus software. Not disputing the usefulness of the platform, just that it's a risky thing to expose to the Internet.
- radium3d 2y ago
  But Wordpress.org actually contains a well reviewed library of the plugins where the review scores and reviews are actually helpful and have the support forum right there as well. It’s going to be the most difficult part to “fork”

Saris 2y ago

I don't think many will, those are far too difficult to use compared to WP which most people use because its so easy.

jdeibele 2y ago

I set up several websites for non-profits of various types. The thing that WordPress.com has going for it is better security (updates applied promptly), lower pricing than dedicated WP accounts at DreamHost, etc. (typically these kind of providers low-ball the first year), usable by non-technical users, etc. Trying to teach people to use Git to push an update seems difficult. And teaching them Markdown. And dealing with images. someorg.wordpress.com is not as nice as someorg.com but there's no domain to be not renewed. There's levels of privileges, etc.

graypegg 2y ago

Ive got Jekyll sites from over a decade ago still buildable and kicking! Hard to beat the stability of simple software that outputs static web assets.