[pjc50]

So, earlier this year I was helping a friend fix their blog. A local news site, run by a middle-aged not very technical woman. She'd taken it over from the previous owners a few years ago, and every now and again things break. She's paying over the odds for hosting, and the support people are .. adequate, but not really going to fix everything for her.

My two thoughts going into fixing it were:

- wow, this Wordpress install kind of sucks

- imagine how much worse it would suck if it wasn't Wordpress

Because it's Wordpress, Google will help me fix all the problems. Update all the plugins and themes; disable the obsolete or broken ones. Sort out the disk space issue. Tweak a few cache settings. And she's back in business.

We (HN) can all build a blog engine. We all seem to have different ideas on how to build a blog engine. And that's fine; we can all have our own little gardens and toy systems to play with. The rest of the world is more concerned with what the actual text of the blog is, if at all. Just as "obsolete iPhone with cracked screen" is the world's most widespread phone by actual use, "slightly broken wordpress" is the world's most popular blogging engine by a long way.

Meanwhile over the horizon, the question of whether any humans will read blogs at all in an AI content / search engine world looms.

[mxuribe]

> ...Just as "obsolete iPhone with cracked screen" is the world's most widespread phone by actual use, "slightly broken wordpress" is the world's most popular blogging engine by a long way...

This is so true! And, as a technologist i tend to get lost down a rabbit hole when helping friends, family, that i forget that lay people simply want stuff that works - even if that stuff is barely working. People say they want "the best", but they'll deal with minimally working crap as long as they can get what they need done. Its a bit of a wake up call to myself and other techies.

[fmajid]

And a good static blog like Hugo or Jekyll will effectively last forever or as long as the hosting bills are paid.

[Brajeshwar]

It might also last as long as Github Pages exits if hosted there. Other contenders such as Cloudflare pages have a good option. Both are free.

[__jonas]

I love the idea of statically generated sites, I just want a nice to use CMS for authoring content that goes along well with the static site generator.

I'm using a SSG for my personal website, where it's no problem for me to manually write markdown files and run a command to build and deploy, but this will not work for sites I'm making for and/or with other non-technical people.

In those cases I'll have to set up some headless CMS, like Netlify CMS (now Decap), Strapi, Directus etc. This means I have to additionally deploy the CMS somewhere (even Netlify CMS, now Decap requires an authentication backend), maybe manage some database – Then because content changes from the CMS need to trigger a site rebuild I need to set that up, use something like Netlify or Vercel or GitHub actions to build and deploy the site, trigger builds with webhooks or via git, or put together some build system myself, it's just a really annoying amount of complexity just to get a simple static site that people can contribute content to in an easy way.

My absolute dream would be an affordable (like managed Wordpress) CMS solution that allows content authoring for non-technical people with a nice UI but then also takes care of building a static site from a connected git repo on every content change and deploys it to some global CDN, similar to Netlify. So I can build my website in Astro/11ty/Hugo/Jekyll or whatever static site generator technology I want but still make it easy to collaborate on content. Netlify was really close to making this possible but unfortunately they didn't seem interested in maintaining / improving it, probably since it isn't really an "enterprise" kind of problem.

[fmajid]

Cloudflare Pages has the GitHub integration and CI, but no the GUI front-end. There is a git CMS frontend called Sveltia CMS that could be a good option but I haven't tried it myself.

[__jonas]

I am using Cloudflare Pages to deploy my personal website, where I author the content by hand in markdown – it's great!

My point is though that unfortunately there is nothing that's as "all in one" as traditional Wordpress hosting for the static site generator world. Sveltia CMS seems to be like Decap / Netlify CMS – my biggest problem with those were always support for media files, like lots of images, maybe videos etc., they just don't fit well into a git repository, and you end up having to bolt another solution on top of it to make it work, like git lfs or an external object storage host. From the Sveltia CMS docs it seems like that's not even an option yet:

> External media storage services are not supported yet. Deprecated Netlify Large Media won’t be added.

And even if you are building a website that's mainly text and small images, I don't really love the flow of all the content going into the the git repository, with huge amounts of commits that are just "X updated blogposty-y.md", especially with lots of collaborators.

I realize I'm asking for a lot with this 'all-in-one' solution, maybe it's just a problem noone else has, I often think about trying to build it myself, although I am aware it would be a really complex undertaking..

[pjc50]

""Normies"" do not use static blog systems because they use the WYSIWYG editor in Wordpress to make (& live preview etc) posts.

[fmajid]

I know, my wife and daughter are still on WP for that reason.