Squarespace Announces Local Development Server

This is insanely cool. No matter how useful/easy your web GUI is, if you have the skill set it's always easier to just do it by hand. Huge congrats to Squarespace, I've already linked this to friends I know that use them and have had customization issues in the past.

This is a great opportunity for those who have tried to teach themselves web basics before to actually add stuff to their own sites and really expand their skillset.

I've been working on my own thing similar to this for HubSpot, having to edit using a clunky CMS live in production is super scary. I really would like to live in a world where most "we make X easier to do" companies release things like this to let people who know how to do it by hand do it faster.

A bit off topic, but if someone from Squarespace can comment - any plans to add an app market?

Squarespace is awesome, but until they offer SSL certificates I can't recommend it to anyone. This is very unfortunate because it's a great product otherwise.

> The first time you access a local template, it will take a while to load as the server fetches the site content. However, once the content has been cached, subsequent requests will complete more quickly until you terminate the server. If you need to invalidate the cache (because you’ve updated your website in the online editor, for example) you can use the ?nocache=true query parameter on any URL.

Why would a developer want to see a cached version of a page? A developer using this is actively developing the look and feel of the site so presumably would want to see the live version. This makes no sense and would only cause issues ("But it looked fine when I tested it locally a minute ago?!").

> The Development Server is built with Java using the Dropwizard framework. It takes advantage of our open-sourced JSON-T compiler and Less compiler. It’s packaged and distributed over NPM using a set of install scripts that detect the target platform and ensure Java is configured correctly. It’s built to be cross-platform, so Windows, Linux, and Mac developers can all take advantage of the efficiencies the Dev Server provides.

If this is really targeted for developers why not just make it a portable executable for each platform (rather than requiring a node install to just fetch the server)?

Alternatively, npm should install pip, use that to install cpan, use that to install gem, use that to install docker, and finally load the server from a container (which does the same series of npm/pip/cpan/gem installers run on Ubuntu 16.04 and then downloads a binary tarball of the app).

I'm not a 100% sure but when I've used similar tools like this before the cached data coming from the web is the _content_ of the page, where the checked out repo I'm in is dealing with the _layout_ of the page. Do you really need the contents of the newest blog posts to be pulled in each time you want to test a CSS layout change?