Post by @homegrown@social.growyourown.services
Hey, self-hosting people, need your help!
Could you recommend static site generators suitable for non-technical people? i.e. Ones that work without needing any command lines, that work entirely graphically.
(There's an odd paradox that static sites are technically much simpler but their editors are often harder to use.)
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RE: https://social.anoxinon.de/@gnulinux/117485163307529684
There was just an article in german from @gnulinux about using https://getpublii.com/download/.
Maybe it is worth a test.
@homegrown It used to be some people used the nice Ghost GUI admin to publish static sites using the JAMstack idea.
Not sure how well supported that is now.
The idea was that Ghost makes the content available via APIs and some other tool reads the content via API and publishes the static site.
@markstos @homegrown Ghost is either a little spendy or a bit devvy though.
That said you can indeed use it with ssg tools like Hugo and if you can kidnap a technical friend, it's worth a look.
@homegrown@social.growyourown.services you're right about the paradox - SSGs are simple, so by definition putting a GUI on top makes them complex.
Basically it sounds like they're after a desktop application that can output a bunch of HTML files...like Dreamweaver 🤣
Not sure what there is today that does the same. Must be something. Isn't there that Zim wiki thing that can output HTML? Technically that would do it, but probably lacking theming.
Hey @manland thank you 🙏 @homegrown
Yes, one can self-host @silex, or just the websites made with it
It's a visual layer on top of HTML/CSS, for people learning web design or making sites for clients with a #JAMStack pipeline (headless CMS, git forge, CI, SSG). Skills go both ways: what you learn in Silex is useful in code, and if you know CSS you feel at home in Silex
If you don't want to learn web standards, it's not the right tool. I believe that @publii with a template works really well
@homegrown I asked about this a while back. Publii is one of the only ones out there, and the only one that is aimed at anything remotely "professional" (e. g. if you need to make something more "respectable" than a garish retro chiptune pixel art collage zine-type thing).
@homegrown I run a private ClassicPress instance to build my site and then use a plugin called Staatic to convert it into static files which get published on a separate server.
Works for WordPress too.
If I was starting from scratch I'd do something different but this might be an option for WordPress sites who recently got a very big wakeup call
This doesn't entirely meet the ask for a *generator*
But most folks don't realize that SeaMonkey has a still-updated FrontPage like site editing tool called Composer. It's a graphical WYSIWYG html editor.
sinza
@homegrown This post I read a couple years ago definitely echoes frustrations about the lack of things like this.
The conclusion of the post isn't something I necessarily agree with, but honestly, I do wish for there to be a graphical interface for a static site generator.
Hopefully there is an answer, as I'm interested in the topic, and I'm not sure if I'm the person who would be the one to make the answer.
@homegrown
BSSG (by fedi's own @stefano) has a nice visual editor, demo here: https://bssg.dragas.net/#editor
@homegrown LLM's rather handy here, one can just shout at the screen in the real time without knowing what the phrase static site means.
@homegrown
Hi, if you want to allow many people contributing to the same site I think a git based cms as Sveltia cms is great. Once you have created the design of your site with other means Svletia provides a minimal client based, javascript interface (accessible via browser by users if hosted on your server) to post new articles and stuff.
Then you need some webhook or gitactions (but be careful of the security concerns of these latter) to trigger the build of the site whenever a commit is done
A bit cumbersome maybe, but once setted, for the users can be effective
@homegrown many great suggestions. I'm going to go in a different direction: if I recall correctly, it is possible to save/export Word documents or Powerpoint presentations as static HTML. Probably LibreOffice, and maybe even GoogleDocs. All this to say that, most people being familiar with office programs, that should cover the content aspect.
As for hosting, I remember installing Apache for Windows on my PC back in the 90s. Just save the files in the www folder, name the main web page file index.html and you've got a website 😁
@homegrown@social.growyourown.services i think we should simply teach "nontechnical" people how to use a command line. if you can handle an Alexa you can handle the CLI.
@homegrown I made a static site generator with a GUI, called AntiWiki, but in practice it proved clunky and inconvenient: https://felix.plesoianu.ro/web/antiwiki/
@homegrown looks like Hugo that people are suggesting used Claude. Publii seems to be free of slop. FWIW.
@homegrown Haven’t used it myself, but I know Bimbo is menu-based and also has deployment builtin: https://bimbo.nekoweb.org/index.html
@homegrown If you just want to run an SSG with a button, you can set that up in VSCode: e.g. https://mastrojs.github.io/docs/setup/#start-a-server
@homegrown All of those Markdown-Notebook apps like Obsidian, Zim Wiki or Logseq can export to HTML. Maybe with a plugin - but that gives non technical users a great way to edit a website.
@homegrown you can use Quarto in RStudio without involving a command line https://quarto.org/docs/get-started/hello/rstudio.html
@homegrown@social.growyourown.services
The following blog platforms might be of interest:
- Pure Blog - https://pureblog.org/
- Astro - https://astro.build/
- Bear Blog - https://bearblog.dev/
- Write Freely - https://writefreely.org/