[bookmarkable]

My input as a former technologist turned marketing guy over the years - where is a decent SSG (perhaps like Zola) with page building drag and drop tools like a Wix or a Squarespace?

I'd love to move our site off of Wix - and have full control when needed and work offline before publishing pages - but inevitably you dive back into code or the guts of database queries once you leave these WYSIWYG tools.

Between Wix and Zola is an opportunity, in my opinion.

[badsectoracula]

Some time ago i found about Publii which is a desktop-based static site CMS with a mostly WYSIWYG editor (i write "mostly" because you do not edit the text directly in the site like you'd do in, e.g. iWeb, but you still use a rich text editor). It works as a desktop application (it is actually written in Electron), you do all editing locally and then you upload the files to a server (you can do that either manually or using its automatic uploading functionality which -from what i can see in my installation- supports FTP/FTPS, SFTP, Amazon S3, GitHub Pages, GitLab, netlify and Google Cloud). The sites are stored in folders with an SQLite database for most stuff and media files in their own folders.

Though in terms of customization is rather lite. There is theme support with custom themes so i guess it is possible, it just looks like a baklava of webdev layers to me that i didn't want to bother with. Most themes do seem to provide a tiny bit of customization though.

I made a blog with it and so far the main limitation is that i don't feel there is much i have to write, not the software :-P.

[0] https://getpublii.com/

[1] http://runtimeterror.com/devlog/

[cpach]

There are starting to appear lots of interesting tools in that space.

See e.g. https://www.sanity.io/ or https://www.contentful.com/

[hexanal]

Everybody seems to be trying that right now!

I haven't formally studied computer science nor programming, so it's very hard for me, but I wanted to build a set of tools that would eventually allow for what I call "block-stitching": a UI that mixes the data, its editor (form fields), and its destination template.

The idea is to be able to quickly build a web page using nestable components, and being able to export/import the structured data, in as many formats as possible.

But since I hardly ever interact with other devs, I might have missed similar projects which are mature enough already? (I just like to build my own crap, it's fun)

[southerntofu]

> Between Wix and Zola is an opportunity, in my opinion.

I strongly agree. There's plenty of niche proprietary tools like that, however i don't know of a collaborative, free-software solution like that.

[chillfox]

RapidWeaver [1] is a WYSIWYG SSG for Mac. I used it a few years ago and it was pretty good back then.

[1] https://www.realmacsoftware.com/rapidweaver/

[marc_io]

Blocs app (Mac only) is another alternative. You can even build WordPress themes with it.