Ask HN: Do you suggest static site generators to your customers? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Do you suggest static site generators to your customers?

#31

Post by tootie » Tue, Jul 11, 2017, 2:38 PM UTC

thangngoc89 wrote: post #30

rolae wrote: post #29

There are now several competing nice services, that give you and your customer a UI to edit your static site with a webtool. https://cloudcannon.com / https://forestry.io/ / https://www.siteleaf.com/ With all of them you can set up nice content type templates and get your client to put structured content. edit: formatting

Also * https://datocms.com * https://prismic.io/ * https://www.contentful.com/

Contentful and Prismic are ones I'm familiar with and they actually support both static generation and API-driven so you can take an incremental approach.

Re: Ask HN: Do you suggest static site generators to your customers?

#32

Post by lenomad » Tue, Jul 11, 2017, 2:39 PM UTC

shakna wrote: post #25

Yes. But they don't know it. They just know that their site is faster than their competitors. I've got a smallish piece of JS that gives the client a WYSIWYG editor, which speaks to Firebase. When Firebase gets an update, it triggers a rebuild. Best of both worlds.

That's very interesting. Is any of this code open-source?

Re: Ask HN: Do you suggest static site generators to your customers?

#33

Post by tootie » Tue, Jul 11, 2017, 2:40 PM UTC

Yes. I built a statically generated site to a Fortune 50 company. Not a microsite either, but one that was highly visible.

Re: Ask HN: Do you suggest static site generators to your customers?

#34

Post by laktek » Tue, Jul 11, 2017, 2:43 PM UTC

I'm working on a project to make it easy to have best in both worlds - static page generation with a browser front-end. Take a look at the intro blog post for a detailed explanation of idea https://www.laktek.com/2016/11/29/introducing-pragma/

I'll be doing a private release in few weeks for the beta subscribers.

Re: Ask HN: Do you suggest static site generators to your customers?

#35

Post by bigmanwalter » Tue, Jul 11, 2017, 2:43 PM UTC

soft_dev_person wrote: post #6

gwbas1c wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But can a web-based updater can still generate a static back-end?

There already exists some nice projects for this, like https://www.netlifycms.org/

That's fine for content based sites, but often times the client wants to edit their homepage as well.

Re: Ask HN: Do you suggest static site generators to your customers?

#36

Post by JoshTriplett » Tue, Jul 11, 2017, 2:47 PM UTC

tootie wrote: post #33

Yes. I built a statically generated site to a Fortune 50 company. Not a microsite either, but one that was highly visible.

Using which site generator?

Re: Ask HN: Do you suggest static site generators to your customers?

#37

Post by xiaoma » Tue, Jul 11, 2017, 2:49 PM UTC

qznc wrote: post #14

xiaoma wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WordPress has had one-click updates for years and makes it easier than any other CMS I've seen. It's been doing a fine job and powering 25% of all pages on the net and growing.

The problem is that updating plugins very often breaks stuff.

I've only had that happen twice in a dozen years.

Re: Ask HN: Do you suggest static site generators to your customers?

#38

Post by alexcabrera » Tue, Jul 11, 2017, 2:54 PM UTC

Plug: Our publishing platform — https://proof.pub — combines an editorial suite, API-based CMS, and Javascript/Sass SDK for creating static compilers using server-side React. When content is released through the editorial suite, we perform a static compilation and push the resulting archive to CloudFront. Works great, sites load quickly, and it all scales very simply.

A real-world example would be the First Round Review (http://firstround.com/review/), designed by our studio (https://marquee.studio) and running on Proof.

Re: Ask HN: Do you suggest static site generators to your customers?

#39

Post by tombrossman » Tue, Jul 11, 2017, 2:59 PM UTC

Yes, definitely, but I have no expectation that they will be the ones managing or updating it. My pitch is basically "I'll do the site and you can email me .docx, PDF, giant 20MB JPEGs, whatever, and I'll manage it for you".

This is even easier then something like WordPress for them, and much simpler for me. WordPress deserves credit for its ease of use for non-technical people, however I don't view this as a good metric for what to choose for a website.

I deliver the _site folder as a finished product and put it on Cloudfront with HTTPS. That's about as simple and unbreakable as it gets. Customers can then pay a monthly retainer or occasional hourly rates for updates. If they want the source files to run the generator on their own machine that's fine too, but it costs extra.

The model isn't that much different from a wedding photographer.

Re: Ask HN: Do you suggest static site generators to your customers?

#40

Post by Symbiote » Tue, Jul 11, 2017, 3:05 PM UTC

We have a custom SSG in Github. Any commit triggers a Jenkins build, which deploys it to our test site. Clicking the "Release" button in Github triggers a production build.

Non-developer staff have been fine with this, editing Markdown files within the Github interface and adding the occasional PDF. If something doesn't look right on the test site, they can ask for advice.