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Comment by zachrose | Hacker News Reader

Many developers have written about ditching a CMS-like thing for a static site generator for their own personal use. I've done it too, it's great!

Is there anybody who's had a good experience getting less technical partners/colleagues/clients to do the same, possibly with something like the GitHub file editor and continuous deployment?

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Although I haven't tried getting a nontechnical user to try it, I spent some time doing just that for my personal site (editing an Octopress blog on Github, with a continuous deployment server compiling it), and I didn't like it. The whole setup felt very fragile, it was impossible to write drafts (I would compose drafts as text files on my local machine), and in the end the Github editor simply leaves somethin to be desired when it comes to UX for blog-post-writing.

A better solution would be to have a raw Jekyll blog on github that you can edit directly, no special setup necessary.

An even better solution (imo) is to have a blog set-up with continuous deployment, and let the user edit the content in a nice local text editor via SFTP.

I think there's a big future for static site generators (that's why I'm building BitBalloon https://www.BitBalloon.com), but the big hurdle for using them for projects for clients is the lack of browser based admin tools.

Stuff like prose.io goes some of the way, but for most users even WordPress requires training, and showing them the raw filesystem is gonna be way to geeky in many cases.

Would love to talk to anyone interested in building a great open source admin panel for a static site generator.

https://code.google.com/p/tortoisegit/

Still too complicated for non-geeks.

I put together a sort-of static site generator for my own purposes called, originally enough, "sites"[1]. It is really just a front-end for GitHub's open source git-backed wiki system, but it works well.

[1]: https://github.com/peterkeen/sites

I've been thinking about leveraging existing open source interfaces for static site generation, creating something between a full cached (Varnish, etc) interface to a dynamic site and generating each page on the fly. So rather than have Wordpress or Drupal or some such thing generate the full site the new post is dumped into the existing static site generator and a site generation pass is triggered.

I'd prefer to retain some dynamic site features like commenting, discussion, and form submission. While there are very successful companies that outsource these features I prefer to have the option to take ownership and control of my content. So I'm envisioning the only dynamic part of the site besides the admin interface is an API to enable these (and more) features. Depending on design and the type of interaction these could trigger a page or site rebuild or update a Javascript framework on the page to reflect the new comment, the successful form posting that updates a calendar, etc.

I wrote a project proposal back in 2010 for something like this. Essentially the key is to turn site updates from being GET-driven to being PUSH-driven.

Bob, we should talk! https://github.com/silentrob/harp-editor

I'm working on a Admin/CMS Editor for Harp http://harpjs.com

MIT, Open source of course.

It could be interesting for deploying small presentation websites for clients. I think editing a file on your computer, using a Markdown editor for example, to change the text for a page, would be more intuitive and practical than editing the text in a web form.

In my humble opinion the iWeb application in MacOSX does a pretty good job.

And it's much more visual experience and GUI experience than writing in a notepad app and "compiling" the site.

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