Strombo, 9 days ago

@skyfaller Terrible question, but it must be asked.

Is the effort to install, teach and maintain a CMS greater than the effort for you to make the client's updates yourself?

Or is that just out of the question?

I am biased, never met a CMS I liked. Some of the static generators are not bad though.

skyfaller, 9 days ago

@Strombo It is not greater than the effort to update one client's site, but if I want to scale this as a business, I can't do everything myself.

Also TMI but I have mental health issues where I go thru periods of being unavailable / unable to work on various tasks, and clients should be able to update their websites when I cannot.

Finally, if I can solve this, I could help static sites become more popular, which could help reduce the environmental impact of the Web. https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/about/the-solar-website/

bigethan, 10 days ago

@skyfaller I recently switched from Hugo to Astro (OSS but funded) and it's been a delight. The docs are incredible, and it is popular enough that there's meaningful and updated packages to do more things with it (there's a whole section on using a headless CMS service: https://docs.astro.build/en/guides/cms/)

not sure if it aligns with your needs, but for me it is a breath of fresh air after wrangling Hugo for so many years. The <Image/> component/service alone is worth it imho

skyfaller, 10 days ago

@bigethan Thank you for the recommendation, I had heard of Astro but didn't realize it generates static sites by default. (Perhaps because it also has dynamic modes) https://docs.astro.build/en/basics/rendering-modes/

How long does Astro take to build your website? I committed to Hugo a while back after suffering through tools like Gatsby that took eons to render websites. I've never really noticed incremental builds on Hugo, and even rebuilding everything from scratch doesn't keep me waiting very long.

amxmln, 11 days ago

@skyfaller I’ve built @mattrbld to solve this problem, maybe it could work for you?

It’s not open source quite yet, but it will be by the end of the year! You can already try it out, if you want to, though. 😊

cschrader, 11 days ago

@skyfaller I have thought about this in the past. I know there are CMSses designed to work with static sites, like this one for #jekyll, though I’ve never evaluated any.

There’s got to be something similar for
#hugo, though cost may be a concern if it’s an enterprise focused tool.

https://www.siteleaf.com/

cschrader, 11 days ago

@skyfaller oh! at a past job, we used the netlify cms, which seems decent. It’s apparently been renamed and is open source, and is not restricted to netlify like I assumed.

https://decapcms.org/docs/intro/

skyfaller, 11 days ago

@cschrader Yeah Decap CMS does not require Netlify, but it does feel like assumptions around something Netlify-shaped are baked into the design, which is a potential problem if hosting is part of my business. I don't have or want a "global CDN".

This is one of the janky-looking solutions I'm evaluating ;-)