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Show HN: Primo – a visual CMS with Svelte blocks, a code editor, and SSG

primocms.org

31–40 of 122 posts

Re: Show HN: Primo – a visual CMS with Svelte blocks, a code editor, and SSG

#31
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From a social standpoint, it was though. You could ask a lot of non-expert people for help on Wordpress and get it.

That's exactly what I mean. They did a great job making people think that if you wanted a blog and weren't a programmer, WP was your only choice.

Ok I will bite. What was an alternative to WordPress especially back then that actually was as easy to use as WP AND had the ecosystem of plugins that WP has. Focus on non technical users only who have no idea how to write code.

Re: Show HN: Primo – a visual CMS with Svelte blocks, a code editor, and SSG

#32
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not really static. It grabs data from a database, or an API, and renders using entity-specific templates, both from a single entity perspective (post.php theme) and listing (search.php, index.php). What I mean is: having something like Primo that allows visual management of such dynamic blocks and themes would be nice, so Editors can just play around with the result of their content calls (which the CMS handles…

That is static - none of it is based on user input so it can be compiled into a static HTML page every time you publish a new post or edit a page theme or anything. There's no reason the system needs to pull that 5 year old blog post from the database every time.

How is it not user input? Editor can opt to show whatever in his list, playing with the external source filters: most visited, or last published, or less visited.

Once the editor is done with his work, if you want to compile a bunch of HTML/CSS and push to Netlify, that's fine. But his interaction with the CMS is not static at all.

Re: Show HN: Primo – a visual CMS with Svelte blocks, a code editor, and SSG

#33
post #26
post #5

Hey HN, it’s been about three years since you sent my open source CMS, Primo, to the front page ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23820201 ), inspiring me to quit my cushy remote job at the height of the pandemic to work on it full-time (naive and impulsive, I agree). Life has been pretty interesting since then. I’ve burned through my savings, lost my primo.af domain name to the Taliban, and convinced my wife to…

Hi Mateo, nice to see the project is still alive and evolving. I personally tried it about a year ago, and I found it really good for designing simple web pages with reusable and customisable components. But the content management system was the issue for me, I was hoping there would be a way to just drop markdown files in a folder for it to generate articles or blog posts following a template like a regular SSG. We…

Thanks! I could definitely see the value in that. Once we make it possible to fetch content dynamically it should be easy to fetch Markdown from a repo and render it anywhere on the page. Or it might be simpler to keep SvelteKit/Astro for that since it does it so well and just use Primo for the non-blog pages, which is currently possible.

Re: Show HN: Primo – a visual CMS with Svelte blocks, a code editor, and SSG

#34
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not really static. It grabs data from a database, or an API, and renders using entity-specific templates, both from a single entity perspective (post.php theme) and listing (search.php, index.php). What I mean is: having something like Primo that allows visual management of such dynamic blocks and themes would be nice, so Editors can just play around with the result of their content calls (which the CMS handles…

That is static - none of it is based on user input so it can be compiled into a static HTML page every time you publish a new post or edit a page theme or anything. There's no reason the system needs to pull that 5 year old blog post from the database every time.

That depends on the desired features. E.g. if you have a tag cloud displayed in the sidebar on each page, author list, etc., any change to any post could potentially mean all pages have to be rebuilt. Or if you have different ways to display items (full, thumbnail), different ways of sorting them, and maybe even variable pagination (i.e. "show me page 7 with 15 items per page"), and it can very easily become unfeasible to statically generate all possible permutations. In the context of "systems that allow newbies to get results" this may not be as important, even there you might want to have little neat things like displaying relative dates. Dynamic doesn't have to mean user input, it just means dynamic. And then there's search, in case you want/need to handle that yourself.

A probably very naive solution to that I came up with and experimented with is keeping track of all things that go into a page, and tag the cache of it with them, so I could invalidate all cached items that refer to a thing that was just changed (where that thing can be anything, a tag, the site title, whatever), but I ended up scrapping in favor of caching everything for 1 hour no questions asked, because it was just total overkill for my use case.

Re: Show HN: Primo – a visual CMS with Svelte blocks, a code editor, and SSG

#35

One of your themes shows an “email subscribe” field like one might expect for a blog with a newsletter. Does this have a concept of email subscribers and management related to such? Does this support transactional/batch emailing?

No, you’d use an external service for stuff like that (I use Getform for emails).

Re: Show HN: Primo – a visual CMS with Svelte blocks, a code editor, and SSG

#36

Great product! How is this different from Strapi or Ghost?

The biggest difference from any existing CMS is the integration of a code-editor and Svelte components, but also the on-page editing is more user-friendly than most CMSs or site builders.

Specifically: It’s a monolithic CMS, unlike Strapi, so you don’t need to include an SSG to turn your content into code. And Ghost is more of a full-featured service for online publications where Primo would be better suited for smaller bags, landing pages, and brochure sites.

Re: Show HN: Primo – a visual CMS with Svelte blocks, a code editor, and SSG

#37
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is static - none of it is based on user input so it can be compiled into a static HTML page every time you publish a new post or edit a page theme or anything. There's no reason the system needs to pull that 5 year old blog post from the database every time.

How is it not user input? Editor can opt to show whatever in his list, playing with the external source filters: most visited, or last published, or less visited. Once the editor is done with his work, if you want to compile a bunch of HTML/CSS and push to Netlify, that's fine. But his interaction with the CMS is not static at all.

Hmm, well if you consider that to be dynamic then editing html files in notepad is dynamic as well I suppose.

Re: Show HN: Primo – a visual CMS with Svelte blocks, a code editor, and SSG

#38
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's exactly what I mean. They did a great job making people think that if you wanted a blog and weren't a programmer, WP was your only choice.

Ok I will bite. What was an alternative to WordPress especially back then that actually was as easy to use as WP AND had the ecosystem of plugins that WP has. Focus on non technical users only who have no idea how to write code.

You're correct. Alternatives were slim. But in retrospect, perhaps that was part of the problem? WP had zero incentive for clean code, QA, industry standards, etc. The more it grew, ironically the less it cared. The embedded base of site and dev as well as the plugin and theme ecosystem maintain the momentum forward, somehow.

Re: Show HN: Primo – a visual CMS with Svelte blocks, a code editor, and SSG

#39
post #5

Hey HN, it’s been about three years since you sent my open source CMS, Primo, to the front page ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23820201 ), inspiring me to quit my cushy remote job at the height of the pandemic to work on it full-time (naive and impulsive, I agree). Life has been pretty interesting since then. I’ve burned through my savings, lost my primo.af domain name to the Taliban, and convinced my wife to…

Great work! I also come from an agency background, and it's refreshing to see content management systems that support flexible page layouts becoming more popular.

Re: Show HN: Primo – a visual CMS with Svelte blocks, a code editor, and SSG

#40
post #35

One of your themes shows an “email subscribe” field like one might expect for a blog with a newsletter. Does this have a concept of email subscribers and management related to such? Does this support transactional/batch emailing?

No, you’d use an external service for stuff like that (I use Getform for emails).

So to be clear, if I used something like Getform for someone to subscribe with email, how could I maintain a list of those subscribers and their emails in the context of Primo? Or could I not?
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