Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
SiteCake: Tiny, simple, flat-file, drag and drop CMS (sitecake.com)
84 points by potatron 4028 days ago
11 comments

Having all kind of issues with this. Dropped in a subfolder (/var/www/html/sitecake)

The following AJAX errors are everywhere: Strict Standards: Non-static method String::insert() should not be called statically, assuming $this from incompatible context in /var/www/html/services/application/cake/libs/debugger.php on line 398

Strict Standards: Non-static method Configure::read() should not be called statically in /var/www/html/services/application/cake/basics.php on line 213

Warning (512): SQL Error: 1030: Got error 28 from storage engine [CORE/cake/libs/model/datasources/dbo_source.php, line 684]

It just doesn't work, which is a shame.

Hey how did you get this? Sitecake is not using cake, SQL or aything you've mentioned. Please download Sitecake from our webiste and try again.
Looks more like a configuration issue. The big clue is s/he dropped your code into a sub-directory but s/he's getting error in code not in that sub-directory (i.e. - not your code).

My guess is the docroot is set to /var/www/html with CakePHP server configuration.

Maybe it broke; it's designed for small sites after all... sorry, I'm new to HN. I didn't realize it'd get that much exposure that quickly. :(
Maybe a security issue? Someone from HN accessed the code?
Simple CMS demos not doing well today.
Sorry guys, server was overwhelmed by ProductHunt and Hacker News visits. We did demo part 'lean way' so it could not cope with uploaded content. It should work now!
The basic idea is awesome. Because the demo doesn't work: Do you support markdown text? Or is it a wysiwig editor that expects you to click buttons above the text editor to get something formatted?
Something like a wysiwig editor. I didn't tried markdown, but it didn't look like supporting it. Small change was pretty easy to make but I didn't play with bigger changes or dropping something more heavy.

I guess we will see when the demo is back online or you can install it somewhere to try it out. It looked pretty good.

In the first code block (how to install) you have the "pretty" (”) quote style rather than just ".
Just to be clear, I'm not the original author. It's just something I've been using with success for mom & pop style websites and felt it was underexposed for being so simple (and free to boot).
Once I read it I thought this is exactly what I would use for friend projects. Personally I find most web tech to be a horrible hack and don't enjoy working on it. This would be quick and easy and allows me to just hand off quickly.
DEMO: File not found.
This didn't seem like much of a CMS to me, more like an editor.
We wanted to stay simple as possible and use wide spread technologies. So HTML pages for templates, PHP for server side, file system for storage and drag and drop for editing.
Cool, how does it work?
Basically you just mark out some <div> tags as class="sc-content", and they'll become drag&drop WYSIWYG editable. The changes get written right back into the file, so you don't need anything other than PHP 5.4 and write permissions. You can even remove the SiteCake file again, and your site will just keep working (as static HTML).
Amazing, thanks for this. This is one of the rare cases when PHP as a language shines for a use-case like this.
It is me or does this feel like WordPress?
Remember it still requires a PHP application server to run with how exploitable (and often heavy) PHP is - I'd be hesitant to call it 'simple'.
Do you have examples of PHP's exportability and heaviness, or are you just repeating words?
Note that the theregister.co.uk link points back to ircmaxell's blog.

The SO link is for an answer from 2009, pointing to an email from 2006.

ircmaxell's blog is spot on - if you actually bother to read what it says. Not keeping a very important part of a webserver up to date with security releases is insecure. Is that a surprise to you, or anyone?

Is Windows or OSX or Linux insecure because they have security patches coming out all the time? What's insecure is user behavior when they keep running old, unpatched versions of software.

You're spreading FUD, repeating words and showing links without actually taking the time to understand the message they are trying to convey.

Case in point: PHP being "heavy". A PHP app can be as lightweight or as heavy as you need it to be. The more you build and the more it does, the "heavier" it becomes. If you throw a proper caching solution at a codebase, it becomes much better, but this is true for anything.

Look at the TechEmpower Benchmarks [0] - PHP raw is usually towards the middle, upper-middle of the pack. Of course, it gets handily beaten by compiled and multi-threaded languages.

[0] https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/

Well, my use case is neighbour/friend websites (I'm not really a web person, but I "do computers", so I get asked a lot). Buying a $3/month domain with PHP webspace, slapping this and some HTML on it and basically being done is simple for me. I mean, compared to a "real" CMS... YMMV, of course.
Is it really impossible to get Python hosting (or better) for $3/month?

I remember that here in Europe, you can get an own virtual machine for roughly $5 to $8 per month, and Python webhosting must be less expensive than that to compete.

To those who downvoted this: Do you care to explain? Did I miss something?
If you buy any webspace it will have PHP installed 99% of the time. There is a huge number of garden-variety webdesigners that server small businesses. These people are used to a combination of PHP + Apache + MySQL + phpMyAdmin. They can install Wordpress on that and know enough JavaScript to modify a gallery script to do what they want.

A Python webspace is much harder to find. Even if they would find one, they could not use it, because online resources for Python are targeted at people that either want to learn to program or already know how to program, not at people that want to use tools as building blocks.

It wasn't me who downvoted you, but if I had to guess why, it would be because administrating a full instance of Linux just to run a CMS is a long way off the ease of dropping a PHP file on shared hosting.