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Comment by Helmut10001 | Hacker News Reader

Static sites all the way (hugo, jekyll, mkdocs!). No one needs wordpress. There's even Sveltia or DecapCMS now, to give those WYSIWYG-people access to static site editing. Then, remove PHP and all the dependency overhead and attack surface and you have a stripped down nginx that is pretty simple, minimalistic and bulletproof.

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The problem is no one ever built one that works for normal people.

Most Wordpress sites are not operated by programmers, they are run by non technical people who just want a wysiwyg editor and a save button. While static site builders ask you to write markdown files, compile the result, upload it to a server, and if you want to collaborate you have to add git to that.

There almost needs to be an admin app which presents a Wordpress admin like ui but has no public exposure, and then it compiles the site to dump on s3 for the production. But as far as I’m aware no one has built this.

Yes, you are right and I agree, there's little empathy with non-coders generally.

Movable type was the most popular blogging software in 2003 and it was essentially this. An admin app written in Perl that spit out static files.

It is kind of surprising that no one tried to do an updated version.

I mean, github pages using the github editor to edit docs pretty much fits that bill

not for "run by non technical people who just want a wysiwyg editor and a save button"

Is this not it? https://pagescms.org/

>github repository

You have already lost the "normal people" audience

City Desk. Where is Joel when we need him!

Retired and probably just chilling around the world.

If I wasn't making 5 other things right now I'd consider making something like city desk. Every other day there are complaints about bots smashing peoples servers. Perhaps its time for a better static site generator.

https://jamstack.org

You're describing the Jamstack or headless CMS concept verbatim.

>Jamstack is an architectural approach that decouples the web experience layer from data and business logic, improving flexibility, scalability, performance, and maintainability.

>Jamstack removes the need for business logic to dictate the web experience.

>It enables a composable architecture for the web where custom logic and 3rd party services are consumed through APIs.

How far into this front page blurb do you think the average non-dev would get before they realize this is supposed to be a thing they can use in place of WordPress?

Pour one out for FrontPage

Ahhh the old positioning with  

I fixed so many sites back in the day by people who thought they knew what they were doing.

> The problem is no one ever built one that works for normal people.

https://getpublii.com/

> Static sites all the way (hugo, jekyll, mkdocs!). No one needs wordpress.

Maybe. A better question may be about how many people need to have the dynamic part of Wordpress live on the Internet? How many would be served well enough with the CMS aspects of Wordpress on the 'backend', but have it spit out static files for the 'frontend':

* https://wordpress.org/plugins/simply-static/

* https://wpstatic.site

php is probably about as secure as nginx. big old bundles of C

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