Hacker News Reader

Comment by therealmarv | Hacker News Reader

Add one or two requirements: Multi-User Blogposting for non tech aware people.

In that case Jekyll or Middleman are not the implementations you want, but static site generators still work. There are various solutions with WordPress-like admin backends that produce static pages for the frontend.

Is there any that is decent yet cheap? I've trying to find one for the small non-profit I help, but the open source implementations I found were at the toy stage (couldn't even embed a video) or Movable Type, which sounds great but at a price of $999, it's about $969 above what they can afford.

We're working on Strattic, which we are beta testing right now. It publishes CMSs as static sites. You can check it out here: https://strattic.com.

Embedding video should be at that price level something like: Upload to Youtube, copy embed code into your YourPageGeneratorNameHere nearly all open source page generators I know support this. You maybe want to look into known very easy solutions like wordpress.com blogger etc. ?!

Having to mess directly with HTML is too risky. Maybe it could work if it had a really easy to use version control, but I've never seen that either.

Wordpress.com is expensive if you want "advanced" features like editing the CSS(!). As for Blogger, I don't want to tie them to a proprietary solution.

Hugo Youtube shortcode: https://gohugo.io/extras/shortcodes/#youtube one of many Jekyll plugins: https://gist.github.com/joelverhagen/1805814

Thanks for the suggestions, but it requires them to edit Markdown, which is a no-go. I need a GUI. Is there an Hugo or Jekyll frontend that provides a GUI and supports those tags? I couldn't find one.

You want a WYSIWYG editor which understands videos on the one side and a light blog posting engine on the other. I think something like this is not existing. Choose your devil: Go WordPress, go to a free service (like blogger) and put a custom domain in front, or accept that markdown can be used. A full featured blog editor which produces light static output is like a hybrid... it sounds to be heavy on the editor and transform part and light on the output... I think nobody is really targeting that on OSS.

Update: Maybe take a closer look to OctoberCMS. It seems to go into your direction.

It does exists, it's called Movable Type, it's just expensive :)

Thanks for the suggestion, but it doesn't seem like it generates static pages...? I'm keen on that because I really don't want to have to babysit the server and apply security fixes (I trust nginx to auto-update without breaking the site).

I actually disagree that Middleman isn't the right tool here - you're just relegating the content ownership to the wrong place. We run a number of multi user blogs in Middleman, but permissions and post ownership lives one level up on a cloud based CMS.

Could you, please, provide more details on this? I'm searching for the same solution. I'm planning a blogger-like static site generator. All media will be on external resources, and I want to keep maintenance price to a minimum (preferably zero) cost. Thanks.

Sure - we use Contentful as our cloud based CMS offering. There are a few other players here - but the only ones I can speak to would be Prismic and Siteleaf, both of which are really solid.

Once you've got your content CMS-side, you can then pull that content into your SSG during the build process. All of those offerings I mentioned also have webhook support, so on publish of any content you can refire the build (to then pull down the new content).

We are loving this setup. There are really very few downsides.

Feel free to hit me up if you want to dig in more - m AT coldandgoji.com

Reply on news.ycombinator.com