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Static Website Generators Are the Next Big Thing

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Re: Static Website Generators Are the Next Big Thing

#161

Post by talmand »

vinceguidry wrote: post #146

People are finally starting to realize that CMSes are horrible. They got us through a time period where the front-end developer is a scare resource, but now there's enough of them everywhere that we don't need WYSIWYG web content anymore. CMSes are eventually going to be relegated to the sole proprietor who doesn't want to learn HTML but still needs to maintain his / her own content-oriented website. My company is ha…

As a front-end developer I still prefer to think of ourselves as a scarce resource.

For selfish reasons I admit.

Re: Static Website Generators Are the Next Big Thing

#162

Post by Domenic_S »

vinceguidry wrote: post #146

People are finally starting to realize that CMSes are horrible. They got us through a time period where the front-end developer is a scare resource, but now there's enough of them everywhere that we don't need WYSIWYG web content anymore. CMSes are eventually going to be relegated to the sole proprietor who doesn't want to learn HTML but still needs to maintain his / her own content-oriented website. My company is ha…

Couldn't disagree more. CMSs enable non-developers to publish good-looking content, which is basically what the web is. You can have a small army of 10-20 writers and 1-2 front end devs styling templates for them. It scales, and it makes sense.

Content is certainly not code; it does not get compiled, it contains no logic. At best content is a property of an object with its structure defined in/as code.

Re: Static Website Generators Are the Next Big Thing

#163

Post by ajslater »

deanclatworthy wrote: post #33

I've been using static site generators a lot for client work over the last two years. I started off with Jekyll, but unless you are having under 100 pages, the build process gets painfully slow (trust me, I have micro-optimised). I've since started using http://gohugo.io It's lightning fast with 1000s of pages, and quite easy to pick up.

go templates are not nestable. Hugo lacks support for pongo nested templates, and refuses to include it.

Re: Static Website Generators Are the Next Big Thing

#164

Post by tjoff »

robinhouston wrote: post #155
Reedx wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's also how the most popular guestbooks and forums in the 90s worked. e.g., WWWBoard, which seemed to be used almost everywhere for quite a while. A perl script would generate a new HTML file and update the index HTML for each post.

The only trouble was they didn’t do it atomically, so if two people posted at the same time everything would get horribly mangled. There was a reason we moved to database-backed sites.

I surely hope that wasn't the reason.

Re: Static Website Generators Are the Next Big Thing

#165

Post by sonthonax »

Domenic_S wrote: post #162
vinceguidry wrote: post #146

People are finally starting to realize that CMSes are horrible. They got us through a time period where the front-end developer is a scare resource, but now there's enough of them everywhere that we don't need WYSIWYG web content anymore. CMSes are eventually going to be relegated to the sole proprietor who doesn't want to learn HTML but still needs to maintain his / her own content-oriented website. My company is ha…

Couldn't disagree more. CMSs enable non-developers to publish good-looking content, which is basically what the web is. You can have a small army of 10-20 writers and 1-2 front end devs styling templates for them. It scales, and it makes sense. Content is certainly not code; it does not get compiled, it contains no logic. At best content is a property of an object with its structure defined in/as code.

However that only works at that scale.

Re: Static Website Generators Are the Next Big Thing

#166

Post by scott_karana »

ams6110 wrote: post #152
scott_karana wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Usability problems like what? Understanding of the command line, delayed WYSIWYG feedback loop, FTPing/synchronizing files. Some generators don't even tackle "pretty, easy to install templates a la Wordpress" either. All surmountable, but I haven't seen an "all in one, easy to use" fix yet. I'd love if I could recommend a single client-side app for people to use that did it all. Something like Coda but tailored for…

Frankly, I'm not sure it matters. Give the average user a CMS with a WYSIWYG editor and you soon end up with a hodgepodge of fonts, sizes, eye-jarring colors, general inconsistency, and 2MB images rendered as 48x48 icons.

Yeah, and the point is, they were able to accomplish something...

I'd be surprised if those same users could even manage to create a single, text-only post in most (pre-setup!) static generators.

Never underestimate agency. A working, ugly solution beats the hell out of a better solution that they can't understand.

Re: Static Website Generators Are the Next Big Thing

#167

Post by vinceguidry »

Domenic_S wrote: post #162
vinceguidry wrote: post #146

People are finally starting to realize that CMSes are horrible. They got us through a time period where the front-end developer is a scare resource, but now there's enough of them everywhere that we don't need WYSIWYG web content anymore. CMSes are eventually going to be relegated to the sole proprietor who doesn't want to learn HTML but still needs to maintain his / her own content-oriented website. My company is ha…

Couldn't disagree more. CMSs enable non-developers to publish good-looking content, which is basically what the web is. You can have a small army of 10-20 writers and 1-2 front end devs styling templates for them. It scales, and it makes sense. Content is certainly not code; it does not get compiled, it contains no logic. At best content is a property of an object with its structure defined in/as code.

> CMSs enable non-developers to publish good-looking content, which is basically what the web is. You can have a small army of 10-20 writers and 1-2 front end devs styling templates for them. It scales, and it makes sense.

Assuming that the content you're publishing is primarily writing, then yes, that makes sense. But most companies on the web are not primarily blogs or news. Hell, even the way news is going, a lot of these Snowcrash-type (or what was that famous NYT article called?) articles are too complicated for a template-driven workflow.

The company I work for is a marketing company, it primarily uses the Internet for e-commerce. Our marketing team gives their ideas to our front-end guy, including mock-ups and copy, and he goes ahead and makes all the HTML/CSS.

I think most companies on the web wouldn't be able to tell the difference between a static site and a CMS, because non-technical people won't even touch an admin back-end anymore. There's just too much to screw up to leave in the hands of a non-professional.

Re: Static Website Generators Are the Next Big Thing

#168

Post by spullara »

jedberg wrote: post #108

When I was heading up reliability at Netflix, we considered, and even began evaluating, turing the whole thing into one big static site. Each user had a custom listing, but generating 60+ million static sites is a very parallelizeable problem. At the time, the recommendations only updated once a day, but an active user would have to dynamically load that content repeatedly, and at the same time, the recs were getting…

I've seen several startups using this technique not only for their content but also for their API responses — they would just store them in S3 with the right headers and serve them through cloudfront. My guess is that this will only get more common with AWS Lambda and other "serverless" technologies.

Re: Static Website Generators Are the Next Big Thing

#169

Post by Fastidious »

tremendo wrote: post #93
EA wrote: post #52

Anyone remember Noah Grey's "Grey Matter"? It was an inspiration to what became WordPress https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greymatter_(software)

I do remember Greymatter when blogging was young, it was Perl-based and it was mostly replaced by Movable-type, also Perl-based before WP finally came to dominate the scene. Textpattern was also popular for a while. I believe Wordpress derived form ExpressionEngine?

WordPress derived from B2.

Re: Static Website Generators Are the Next Big Thing

#170

Post by antod »

stadeschuldt wrote: post #160
ChristianBach wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried Pelican? Staticgen.com lists all of them, and it tells you what language each one uses.

I have looked at Pelican but isn't that more for a blog (chronological updates vs. static non-changing content)

I find that Pelican itself can do the non changing stuff, but that it is really hard to find themes or examples that aren't blog oriented.

But I'd be keen to hear about the kinds of things MiddleMan etc does better than Pelican for non blog sites though....

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