Comment by seanwilson | Hacker News Reader

Comment by seanwilson | Hacker News Reader

I think one big missing part still with static sites is how you host the CMS to edit it.

Correct me if I'm wrong but Decap CMS (previously Netlify CMS) runs in the browser and makes reads/edits via GitHub which can then trigger rebuilds and deploys, but it still needs a small server/proxy I think because CORS stops your browser communicating directly with the GitHub API. Netlify hosts a GitHub backend that proxies requests for you but now you're tied to Netlify and their pricing plan changes.

GitLab and BitBucket will have the same issue I think: https://github.com/isomorphic-git/isomorphic-git#cors-suppor...

Is there a simple solution here with minimal configuration? I guess you could use a browser extension to selectively relax CORS but that's not ideal.

It feels like a Git-based static site generator with a CMS that has Markdown editing and live previews that runs in the browser with minimal hosting/server restrictions would work for a huge number of small websites and blogs.

What I would like is a good way to create structured data admin systems that can include HTML content, and then have my static generator access that to build the pages via a JSON feed or whatever. For example, having records for individual products including a body description which can be in HTML format. This means that other people can update the products, but we still have a static website. I thought Airtable would be suitable but surprisingly it doesn't support HTML fields very well.

Not sure if this helps but Decap-CMS lets you define your own records with fields, like a shopping product record with a price field and Markdown/HTML description, where the content is saved to Git in simple JSON/YAML data files. You can then edit the records via the browser web interface, which commits changes to Git and your static site generator would build the site from the data files.

Decap-CMS demo here: https://cms-demo.netlify.com/#/collections/posts

Not exactly what I'm looking for but thanks I'll look into that.

> I think one big missing part still with static sites is how you host the CMS to edit it.

This problem is completely solved by Surreal CMS [1]. Make your website anyway you want, connect surreal by FTP and let the user/client edit what you permit them to edit. The cost $12 per month is dirt cheap for never having to worry about it, and giving non-tech users a total WYSIWYG editor.

[1] https://www.surrealcms.com

It's open source? I'm looking for an open source solution.

You never know when they'll change their pricing, like when Forestry was recently deprecated in favour of Tina CMS with more limited free plans.

This local backend feature seems pretty powerful for free/offline editing: https://decapcms.org/docs/beta-features/#working-with-a-loca...

my experience is limited but I once saw "frontmatter" extension to VS Code which seemed very powerful to serve as CMS and even edit your site's templates.

currently this extension works on locally installed version of VS Code on you laptop,but doesn't work on Github Codespaces.

if we could somehow get that to work (within the free tier of github codespaces, with reasonable limits on usage time) i think it would be a winner -- completely online version controlled setup with no dependency on a dev environment installed on your own machine, while serving static sites off say just S3, and still getting a full CMS experience.

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