The CMS is dead, long live the CMS • Hacker News Board

Re: The CMS is dead, long live the CMS

#101

Post by tappio » Sun, Apr 05, 2026, 6:08 PM UTC

jeromegv wrote: post #25

tappio wrote: post #20

I have built a product which uses AI to built Astro sites. LLM builds the sites in steps and make sure that they get 100/100 scores in pagespeed insights. These sites are served with a CDN. You can edit the sites with LLM interface, or use markdown editor to edit sites, or edit texts directly on a dashboard. These sites are static. There is no vendor lock in. If you want to migrate and manage yourself, just go to clo…

What do you use to edit texts on a dashboard or cms? My wife needed a website. I’m not much of a frontend coder but I looked at the price of squarespace for a year and decided to go that route with AI. Website is Astro. I easily update sophisticated designs with Claude or Gemini cli. Hosted for free on cloudflare, it’s super fast. Any git update deploys to the website in a minute. Got an hosted email form with astro…

For some personal projects in the past I have used google sheets and cloudflare workers, I guess it could be called CMS, but it was quite restricted of course.

This project has a "shared" backend for the content management and its completely self built. Because there are many clients who use it to edit things its feasible to pay for the hosting.

For a solo project, id be quite interested if someone would build a native editor that can be just hooked with git, so it would make it possible to run the site serverless. Maybe one already exists. "IDE" for static websites.

Re: The CMS is dead, long live the CMS

#102

Post by XCSme » Sun, Apr 05, 2026, 9:53 PM UTC

I tried using Astro for https://aibenchy.com, initially it went great, but then I got into static-website limitations (such as dynamically generating all comparison pages, which would been generating N^4 pages, where N is the number of tested models).

I ended up switching to plain PHP, and it worked great. It is still mostly "static", but I can dynamically include the same content on multiple pages without having to duplicate/build it every time.

Re: The CMS is dead, long live the CMS

#103

Post by ofrzeta » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 4:39 AM UTC

nkko wrote: post #98

ofrzeta wrote: post #86

For a while flat-file CMSs where all the rage. I've been using Grav for a while, it is based on (markdown) files as well but also has a GUI and a comparatively large community. https://getgrav.org/ "Voted "Best Flat File CMS" in 2017, 2019, 2020 & 2021!" :-)

What happened in 2022?

Starting with 2022 Statamic became the winner.

Re: The CMS is dead, long live the CMS

#104

Post by huijzer » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 12:52 PM UTC

simonw wrote: post #60

huijzer wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I ran git-based blogs for years and have gone back to CMS. The instant preview and the instant publishing really make it a lot more pleasant to work with it. With Git, my read-eval-print loop so to say was a minute which is just too long. Fixing a typo then takes 2 minutes.

Now I'm imagining a static site editing tool that runs the exact same templates client-side to power an accurate preview that are then used by the static page build process.

I’ve tried to build that but GitHub doesn’t allow secrets to be stored inside browser so you can’t commit.

Re: The CMS is dead, long live the CMS

#105

Post by simonw » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 2:06 PM UTC

huijzer wrote: post #104

simonw wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now I'm imagining a static site editing tool that runs the exact same templates client-side to power an accurate preview that are then used by the static page build process.

I’ve tried to build that but GitHub doesn’t allow secrets to be stored inside browser so you can’t commit.

GitHub's content API is available over CORS: https://tools.simonwillison.net/cors-fetch#method=PUT&url=ht...

I've built client-side apps that store a GitHub token in localStorage and send them with fetch() for creating Gists and that works fine: https://tools.simonwillison.net/terminal-to-html

Re: The CMS is dead, long live the CMS

#106

Post by adrianwaj » Tue, Apr 07, 2026, 4:59 AM UTC

hombre_fatal wrote: post #65

RHSeeger wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But once you’re dealing with multiple users (tens or hundreds) it’s a different problem. How confident are you writing auth and password reset flows? How sure are you that the AI got it right? How solid is your approach to roles and permissions? Are you implementing 2FA? Supporting drafts, scheduled publishing, editorial workflows? Now you are also tech support writing the infrastructure as issues come in. And that…

I built a production forum from scratch with thousands of real users. For years I thought of doing it. Can’t be that hard. You can imagine how every component would work. You just need a few tables, right? But it turns out a polished forum that people want to spend time on has infinite polish. Every feature explodes into a fractal of micro polish. You could spend your whole life improving it and handling rough edges…

I suppose building it from scratch means you could release the source and then charge for customizations or for push demands. Would you even consider doing that?