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

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

#71

Post by ransackdev »

mmmateo wrote: post #59
ransackdev wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Primo is not the opposite. From the primo site, the 3 main bullet points - Drag-n-drop page building > Build your site's pages by dragging and dropping your directly blocks onto the page, unencumbered by overwhelming design options. - Visual content editing > Update your text, images, and links directly on the page or open up the Fields view to manage your content from a structured view. - Integrated development > Ac…

Ah yeah I forgot Dreamweaver does give you access to the code, in that regard it's similar. But, speaking as a user of Primo (and echoing what I've heard from a lot of other users), I haven't found anything that rides the line between no-code and code quite like this (especially open-source). Yes Primo offers visual content editing and page building, because that's the only way to make a page flexibly editable by a n…

From what I see they all offer drag and drop UI elements with the ability to dig into the underlying code if you want to. I'm not seeing a difference between all of them other than what the flavor of the week is in terms of lanugage powering the CMS. I remember when ghost was all the rage, and many others. Again, not crapping on your project, props to you for the dedication, and if you're happy working on it that's all that matters

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

#72

Post by tamimio »

mmmateo wrote: post #68
tamimio wrote: post #63

Great project. But honestly, I reached to the point of “less JS” or even no js is better for developers and also users. I’m currently migrating my old blog to a new one that gets generated by Zola [1], and even my main portfolio site, which funnily enough I newly made it with React/Gatsby, but I’m redoing it again with Zola because of the performance gap is just unmatched, not to mention I personally sometimes browse…

I agree! That's why Primo generates static HTML & CSS & only includes [vanilla] JS when its necessary to hydrate any interactive components. All using the Svelte compiler under the hood.

Awesome, thanks, love the project I already signed up! Might give it a try on my company site if I found some templates for commercial sites.

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

#73

Post by mmmateo »

stOneskull wrote: post #67
mmmateo wrote: 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…

it's working for me :) i've been using primo for the last week to make my blog, and i feel more productive, and i've learned a lot. the forum is cool too. answers to a couple questions i had were already there. thank you for making primo.

That's awesome! So glad you like it

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

#74

Post by gochi »

klaussilveira wrote: post #12

I wish there was something like this, but for serial dynamic content, like blog posts, reviews, etc. People are really attached to WP, but customization and themes are a nightmare.

Take your pick https://jamstack.org/headless-cms/

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

#75

Post by mmmateo »

zote wrote: post #56
mmmateo wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup! Makes it super easy to spin up a server. We're working on making it backend-agnostic to open it up to more people, but Supabase has always been my go-to.

It would indeed, you clearly worked long, and hard on this as such I'd like to ask (since you've used Svelte). What is something you wish you knew earlier (a feature or an approach) with Svelte that you've found invaluable?

It's hard to think of something I wish I knew earlier tbh. Svelte (and SvelteKit) are just so simple and approachable that I feel like whenever I need to do something new I can just try what feels most intuitive and it just works. I've heard the same thing from a lot of other people too. If anything I would just keep an eye on reactive statements; I wouldn't trade them for the world but they can be dangerous if you don't keep an eye on them.

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

#76

Post by did »

nobleach wrote: post #62

The drag-n-drop blocks/slices of content CMSes look cool in demos. As someone who has an in-house developed CMS editor just like this, it's a nightmare of constant updates. "Can we right align text and turn it blue?", "sure we'll add more and more props to each block". The actual content creators have a hard time using it effectively. So the results are almost always unsatisfactory. More training could possibly help…

Context: I'm the creator an open source page builder in Ruby on Rails named Maglev (https://www.maglev.dev), pretty much similar to Primo (congrats for their product, looks amazing!).

A couple of months, I used my own tool (Maglev) when revamping an e-commerce site of a client who didn't have a content management system to edit the marketing part of her site. So I sliced the site into editable "Maglev" sections/blocks. The result was great in terms of editing experience BUT a couple of months later after the launch, my client hired another marketing person with HTML/CSS "skills" (I'd say 101 HMTL/CSS level). And I had a hard time to convince her that it was a bad idea to write HTML/CSS code herself but instead to let me (or another developer) write the missing sections she wanted.

A solution would have been to add in Maglev some kind of dev editor like in Primo. However, based on my long experience, you really don't want your client to touch the HTML/CSS of your site. And I don't believe in the "you break it, you pay for it" mojo or at least this is not the kind of relationship I want with my clients.

On a higher level, any kind of CMS has the same issue. For instance, I helped a company with a broken Webflow site and it was the typical issue: a designer built their site and later the marketing person tried to "improve" the UI and broke everything.

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

#77

Post by spankalee »

mmmateo wrote: post #53
spankalee wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would love to see this where blocks are standard web components and use native encapsulation!

I just tried it out with web components using Lit and it seems to work pretty well ( https://i.imgur.com/PFvMgFp.png ), allowing you to pass in on-page editable fields. But I'd be interested to hear where web components would work better than static/hydrated components.

Looks like that's using lit-html templates inside Svelte, but not any custom elements.

Web components would be good because they're an interface that Primo could work with without relying on specific implementation details. They're also encapsulated with shadow DOM, and support interoperable composition (components can have child elements made from any other frameworks or library).

So you could still build blocks with Svelte, but also Lit, Preact, Stencil, Vue, etc.

In a similar situation, I was advising the https://blockprotocol.org/ folk on how to define some interfaces on top of HTMLElement to allow standardized passing down of data to blocks, instead of requiring React in their case. I don't know how far they've gotten with that.

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

#78

Post by mthoms »

ransackdev wrote: post #54
kykeonaut wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, that is actually a big problem (benefit?) with Wordpress, were all the code is redistributable because of the GPL license. So paid plugin developers are in this weird limbo were they are charging people for their plugins without telling them that the code is freely redistributable.

A plugin is a separate code module that wordpress loads, surely those are not bound to the wordpress core license. Extending wordpress with non-wordpress owned code does not grant them the right to push their license onto somebody else's completely unrelated code. If that were true, nobody would ever be able to sell a proprietary app on any linux distro. GitLab is open core yet extends the functionality with enterpri…

There's no legal precedent yet, but WordPress plugins/themes are widely considered as being GPL because they're a "derivative" work.

Or, at least the PHP code in those plugins/themes are - possibly not the CSS + assets.

https://kinsta.com/learn/wordpress-gpl/

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

#79

Post by mmmateo »

did wrote: post #76
nobleach wrote: post #62

The drag-n-drop blocks/slices of content CMSes look cool in demos. As someone who has an in-house developed CMS editor just like this, it's a nightmare of constant updates. "Can we right align text and turn it blue?", "sure we'll add more and more props to each block". The actual content creators have a hard time using it effectively. So the results are almost always unsatisfactory. More training could possibly help…

Context: I'm the creator an open source page builder in Ruby on Rails named Maglev ( https://www.maglev.dev ), pretty much similar to Primo (congrats for their product, looks amazing!). A couple of months, I used my own tool (Maglev) when revamping an e-commerce site of a client who didn't have a content management system to edit the marketing part of her site. So I sliced the site into editable "Maglev" sections/blo…

> However, based on my long experience, you really don't want your client to touch the HTML/CSS of your site.

Certainly, and in the same vein you don't want your client touching the design of the site. Clients can barely write good copy, much less make good design decisions. My freelance projects go a lot more smoothly now that I can hand off the site to the client knowing that they're restricted to adding/removing blocks and updating content (and that they can't see the 'open code' button).

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

#80

Post by nailer »

> Is Primo open-core? VC-funded open source? Side project?

> Primo is under full-time development and is in the process of becoming a nonprofit organization. Any funds generated from White Glove and Cloud will go towards funding further development, in the same vein as Ghost CMS.

The above is a stupid answer, it’s open source and MIT licensed: https://github.com/primocms/primo/blob/master/LICENSE

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