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Publii: Open-source local WYSIWYG static site CMS

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Re: Publii: Open-source local WYSIWYG static site CMS

#61

Post by rchaud »

doodlesdev wrote: post #56
marc_io wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's still around, but it's no longer being improved, just getting maintenance. Most of the people involved with it migrated elsewhere. Most who used Dreamweaver and relied on its extensions are now using another similar app called Wappler.

For those that are into Bootstrap then Bootstrap Studio is also a good option which I found produces pretty decent results.

Yep, I'm a fan of Bootstrap Studio, if for nothing else than the fact that it's not a subscription product.

Re: Publii: Open-source local WYSIWYG static site CMS

#62

Post by _fat_santa »

jrm4 wrote: post #8

It's interesting to see people rediscover this idea of "develop locally, push static site to web," but I think the weirdest thing for me is, why was this not a continuous thing? Broadly, this looks good for a blog format, but not sure if that's what people need? Anyway, for those interested, I just use http://zim-wiki.org plus a custom CSS template I did.

This might be good for a personal blog where you have it local on your machine, but want a blogging interface that's separate from your coding tool (VSCode, etc).

The problem is that if you have to pull down the site to edit content, it defeats like 99% of the use cases of a CMS. The whole point of a CMS is to provide an interface for editing a website without editing code directly and not having the code on locally to make edits.

Re: Publii: Open-source local WYSIWYG static site CMS

#63

Post by jrm4 »

innomatics wrote: post #58
jrm4 wrote: post #8

It's interesting to see people rediscover this idea of "develop locally, push static site to web," but I think the weirdest thing for me is, why was this not a continuous thing? Broadly, this looks good for a blog format, but not sure if that's what people need? Anyway, for those interested, I just use http://zim-wiki.org plus a custom CSS template I did.

> why was this not a continuous thing? We had the likes of Netscape Composer, Front Page and Dreamweaver. They produced mountains of un-maintainable and not non-compliant html code. When HTML5 came along there was a big push for compliant sites. Also it made sense to have a developer use the power of CSS3 to handle layouts and responsiveness elegantly. So the WYSIWYG editors fell out of favour.

As opposed to what we have now? :)

Re: Publii: Open-source local WYSIWYG static site CMS

#64

Post by patchtopic »

I've been using this for a while, not perfect but pretty good. I'm enjoying not having to deal with security updates for my simple single user CMS. While being able to quickly and easily add posts and articles without messing about too much with web dev administrivia.

Re: Publii: Open-source local WYSIWYG static site CMS

#65

Post by zerkten »

mysterydip wrote: post #42
pbowyer wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's interesting to see people rediscover this idea of "develop locally, push static site to web," Yes! Dreamweaver was good 19 years ago and remains good today. Being able to see what you're doing, without running like treacle in the browser whilst editing (I'm looking at you, Divi and other WP visual theme builders), is an awesome experience. Like professionals in many other fields expect from their software.

I used dreamweaver when they had coldfusion integration. We ended up using the wysiwig just for verification because it would make the code so bloated (by late 90's standards). I recall using HotDog Professional for my personal stuff. Anyone else use it?

Yup, I used HotDog Pro for a while and moved onto HomeSite (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macromedia_HomeSite) at some point.

Re: Publii: Open-source local WYSIWYG static site CMS

#66

Post by zerkten »

moonchrome wrote: post #57
pbowyer wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's interesting to see people rediscover this idea of "develop locally, push static site to web," Yes! Dreamweaver was good 19 years ago and remains good today. Being able to see what you're doing, without running like treacle in the browser whilst editing (I'm looking at you, Divi and other WP visual theme builders), is an awesome experience. Like professionals in many other fields expect from their software.

>Dreamweaver was good 19 years ago Good for what ? I remember designers trying to create pages with and the generated code was useless garbage once the customisation requests came in and they called in a dev

I would say Dreamweaver was OK, but it was eclipsed by the web-based CMS. Dreamweaver generated trash code when it was used as a DHTML design tool, but it was never as bad as FrontPage. When used in design-mode it would build up a model internally, and then try to generate code that it could later roundtrip. This worked when things were isolated, but as complexity grew it stopped working and was hard to debug.

I saw it work reasonably well when someone took a code-first approach with the overall website templates which avoided the mess from building these up using DW's code generation. You could then set it up so people could only mess with the certain parts of the page which avoided the overall site getting messed up as you added others. This got cleaner when they introduced Contribute.

Dreamweaver was created for a time when there was still a webmaster-type role in companies. These people didn't necessarily have what we'd consider a strong dev skillset, but the world around them had started to change which explains the range of capabilities in Dreamweaver.

If you want to see some terrible server-side code generation, you should checkout Drumbeat (https://macromedia.fandom.com/wiki/Macromedia_Drumbeat).

Re: Publii: Open-source local WYSIWYG static site CMS

#67

Post by deepspace »

dbrgn wrote: post #52

There is a somewhat similar system called Lektor, originally written by Armin Ronacher (of Flask/Jinja fame): https://www.getlektor.com/ You define your models, then start the local devserver to add entries for the models. In the end, it stores the data in the filesystem and outputs static HTML.

I scrolled down, hoping to find mention of Lektor. It is an outstanding and under-appreciated system. I have been using it for all my sites for several years.

Re: Publii: Open-source local WYSIWYG static site CMS

#68

Post by nikolamircic »

jrm4 wrote: post #8

It's interesting to see people rediscover this idea of "develop locally, push static site to web," but I think the weirdest thing for me is, why was this not a continuous thing? Broadly, this looks good for a blog format, but not sure if that's what people need? Anyway, for those interested, I just use http://zim-wiki.org plus a custom CSS template I did.

I think that user experience of website builders with wysiwyg and drag and drop UX won over time. Then, as time passed by, website builders become bloated and complex. Once again you needed a professional to maintain your site in site builder.

So now simple solutions, static HTML, free or one-time fee CMSs are sexy again. (economy is not good, who wants another subscription?)

I know because 14 years ago we have created static, drag and drop CMS that people still buy today. People value basic features. And it's hard to make a complex software that's easy to use.

Basic features are still enough, after 14 years. https://sitecake.com

Re: Publii: Open-source local WYSIWYG static site CMS

#69

Post by toyg »

troymc wrote: post #37
indigodaddy wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does Publii still not officially support git versioning? If it did I probably would have played with it..

I don't think Publii is aimed at people who know what git is. Those people already have lots of great options.

It doesn't have to be git as much as just some form of versioning. Everybody loves versioning, they don't have to care about what powers it.
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