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by amirhhz 5391 days ago
Ever since I installed Wappalyzer in my browser (detects what frameworks and technologies a website uses) more and more often I come across websites that I am shocked use so many backend and frontend frameworks. I'm shocked because that means they are spending unnecessary amounts of money, time and effort on hosting (e.g. Wordpress hosting), development and maintenance when the entire site would be perfectly well-served (and faster!) with static pages.

The problem until recently was that there weren't appropriate tools for the job, but this article should prove that's now changing.
2 comments
jordanlev 5391 days ago
I agree that a lot of frameworks are overkill, but if you put yourself in the frame of mind of a non-programming designer or a layperson who just needs to manage content on their site, using a static HTML generation tool is out of the question. I've been using octopress/jekyll recently and think it's amazing and really love it, but there's no way in a million years I could give that to a client to manage their own website.

Also, it's not really wasting time or money -- cheap shared hosting costs the same regardless of whether you're serving a php/mysql app or static html files. And setting up a wordpress site is probably easier for non-programmers than getting a jekyll setup going.

It's definitely a colossal waste of CPU power though, but that train left the station 10 years ago.

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amirhhz 5391 days ago
I agree, my point is mostly relevant to someone with some minimum level of technical ability. But providing a usable interface and "install" process for a static website generator is the missing piece here.

Or a reversal to geocities days ... :-/

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LeafStorm 5391 days ago
An interesting idea that I had once is a server-side application that can edit the site files, save them to Git or Mercurial, and then compile them statically and push to a server via FTP, SFTP, WebDAV, S3 API, or rsync.
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simonbrown 5391 days ago
CushyCMS does that, but without DVCS (although it does support versioning).
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AdesR 5391 days ago
Developmentseed.org used to be a Drupal site, fwiw.
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Jgrubb 5391 days ago
DevSeed used to be one of the bigger name Drupal consultancies. They've been moving into other stuff over the last year and a half, for what that's worth.

edit: I just figured out that you probably already knew that. Cheers.

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amirhhz 5391 days ago
Wow, perfect case in point, then.
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