Just noticed that about 57% of websites don't use a CMS like Wordpress/Drupal/etc. [1] If you don't use a CMS, what do you use exactly? I use github to host static sites, and things like Heroku for web apps.
Interestingly (for me), I've started going back to building more or less static sites for clients. I used Wordpress for a long time, but have increasingly found none of them want to blog, and few of them update either the site (or Wordpress, which can end up a security nightmare).
Often when it came to updating pages, they would call or email and say "can you do XXX", to which I'd reply "I can, but so can you". 90% of the time they're more than happy to pay me to update a page in Wordpress, which I could have done just as easily / quickly in a static site.
Long and short, the overhead of building a custom theme and setting up Wordpress isn't worth it for most clients, and even less me in a cost/time for the money way.
I am going through a similar transition. Moving my ten odd Drupal sites I built for family and friends to Hugo. In other cases just plain HTML using WinHttrack to download HTML version of site as is. I will convert to Hugo if need arises.
Only one user from the 10 ever used the CMS functionality to modify her site. She did it the one year, totally forgot her password and the following year asked me to make the changes. Maintenance of a CMS is even more of a struggle if that isn't your core job. If I worked on Drupal for my day job I wouldn't leaving the sites on Drupal.
Just about to transition most or all of my Wordpress sites to static generate sites, probably using Hugo.
I love static sites. They load incredibly fast, they're extremely cheap to run, the security hassles go way down and, as another commenter mentioned, they work for the long-term. And these days there are plenty of solutions for reader feedback that don't require you to run a Wordpress instance.
Github to host static page because CSS Flexbox and HTML are so easy and will be well supported in 2017.
I use Swift Sever Side framework for backend and Sveltejs (https://Svelte.technology) for front-end JavaScript to handle just about anything that jQuery could and a lot easier to run same compiled modules code on Nodejs and web browsers with Rollup.
Less worry than running frameworks that will encounter bugs that may take time to resolve e.g. React, Angular 1/2 have enormous issues since 2014/2013, Swift and Sveltejs are a great combination. I roll, I roll, I roll out in 2017!
Pssst. DOM are fastest when you only need to update a small portion of your code and majority of use case with DOM manipulation is fine.
This 57% sounds horribly wrong. They don't really explain how they come to this conclusion here: https://w3techs.com/technologies
My gut feeling is that 57% is a huge number if you assume that they don't use a CMS. I don't think that's manageable by the average owner with static site generators. None of my clients would be able to update their site with GIT + text editors. It's more likely that there's some kind of backend system that the survey was unable to identify.
This is kind of what got me. I feel like the majority of people wouldn't be savvy enough to do a site without a CMS as the setup is a little involved, or at least more involved than the simplicity of going to Wordpress.com and starting a site. So I don't know if I'm just missing something major here, or if the data is off.
Well, that's 57% that they could identify and that they happened to classify that way. There are lots of ways to obscure what's running and many more platforms out there.
I'm loving Jekyll. I've been building a blog with it and it's been a joy so far. I also have a 'main site' (just links to my social media and a little 'about me'), which I made using old-fashioned hand-written HTML and CSS. When I started on that I was a total noob, and now I have to update and maintain it, I understand the error of my ways. I'll probably switch to Jekyll for that too. At the moment I'm hosting everything on Netlify.
Processwire (http://processwire.com) is the darkhorse in the CMS race. Like Wordpress, it is also PHP/MySQL based. However, the ease of use, documentation, and extensibility has really won me over.
I think the difference between Processwire and Wordpress has been in the developer experience. The former (Processwire) is better organized, direct, and addresses the most common things you would want to do in the CMS. Wordpress docs just feel like an afterthought and more of an index of things.
At the moment, I use Caddy's built-in Markdown and template features [1], and simply rsync a bunch of markdown files to my server. It's basic, and certainly not as performant as hosting out static files, but it works well enough for my low-traffic site.
Usually, I develop using https://harpjs.com/ because it's literally zero-configuration and does a ton (seriously, "harp server" and you get sass/less, ejs/jade/markdown and more), then compile to flat html, css and javascript.
Hugo and S3 buckets. Have a Docker image that does the builds and deploys. All triggered on git push using Bitbucket Pipelines https://github.com/rabidgremlin/hugo-s3
I'm using IndExhibit [ http://www.indexhibit.org ] a PHP CMS Thing from 2006. It's unsupported now but simple and viewed well in the design community. I host it staticly by wget-spidering it when I make a change. Only takes a few seconds to update my archive anyway.
It's hacky, but the rest of my site uses AppEngine and I really don't feel like exposing a unsupported hack job of PHP to the open internet. Had a few issues that required modification to the themes, but that was the only issue ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
A single file named `index.php` that loads a bunch of text files and spits out what looks vaguely like a blog.
It's a total mess. Business logic and HTML snippets scattered everywhere. Layers of caching to make the whole thing load in less than 0.03 seconds on cheap shared hosting. I'm sure I do a much better job for paying clients, but somehow never get around to fixing the decade-old garbage that runs my own site.
At least it doesn't have any SQL injection vulnerabilities :p
I started out as a WordPress developer, so once I moved to more advanced programming I kept using WordPress, but it was so annoying to have to keep up with the updates that I decided to try Jekyll because of their static site nature.
Static sites are awesome because they're wicked fast, and they work in perpetuity. I'm a huge fan. If you can handle a little coding I think it's much preferable to a CMS.
For my personal website, I wrote a backend in Haskell: https://github.com/myfreeweb/sweetroll after trying a lot of static generators, writing Dropbox-backed blog engines, etc.
It uses the Micropub protocol for posting/editing/deleting (I also made a frontend editor app for Micropub: https://github.com/myfreeweb/micro-panel), Webmention for talking to other websites, Git+JSON to store content.
I don't like the PHP/MySQL CMS world at all, but I use that at work. We use MODX Revolution (with some sites still on Evolution).
Firstly, sweetroll looks amazingly cool and being able to add javascript plugins seems like a great idea.
Second, have you looked at clckwrks[0]? It aims to specifically dethrone wordpress by making plugins that are provably safe. I think this is a viable way to attack wordpresses stronghold, though I think being able to do things like write plugins based in javascript or other popular languages when an existing provably safe plugin doesn't exist will also be necessary.
Last time I tried clckwrks it was a bit hard to get setup (this was pre-stack) so I don't blame you for rolling your own solution.
I do wonder what you think of clckwrks and the idea of exploiting Haskell to make provably safe plugins so you can create a large ecosystem without the security issues that wordpress plugins have.
If your site has a lot of content, you'll have to use a few tricks to retain fast builds [1].
We had to build a lightweight CMS[2] for regular folks to update content, and a pro hosting alternative to GitHub pages that supports multiple branches, authentication, redirections, proxying...
We're Open Sourcing the CMS part; shoot me an email if you use Jekyll and are interested in testing it out.
I wonder what percentage of websites created by non-technical people are hosted using SaaS that's technically a CMS but isn't standalone -- e.g. Squarespace or Blogspot or Google Sites?
I'm toying with Google App Engine and writing a mini-CMS/ecommerce thing in Python. To create products, categories, and subcategories, you just create folders.
A friend had difficulties with Wordpress + Woocommerce I set for them and I figured everyone knows folders.
I'm tinkering with it from time to time. (As you might notice, I'm also learning web dev, CSS and stuff)..
[+] [-] iamben|9 years ago|reply
Interestingly (for me), I've started going back to building more or less static sites for clients. I used Wordpress for a long time, but have increasingly found none of them want to blog, and few of them update either the site (or Wordpress, which can end up a security nightmare).
Often when it came to updating pages, they would call or email and say "can you do XXX", to which I'd reply "I can, but so can you". 90% of the time they're more than happy to pay me to update a page in Wordpress, which I could have done just as easily / quickly in a static site.
Long and short, the overhead of building a custom theme and setting up Wordpress isn't worth it for most clients, and even less me in a cost/time for the money way.
[+] [-] mmsimanga|9 years ago|reply
Only one user from the 10 ever used the CMS functionality to modify her site. She did it the one year, totally forgot her password and the following year asked me to make the changes. Maintenance of a CMS is even more of a struggle if that isn't your core job. If I worked on Drupal for my day job I wouldn't leaving the sites on Drupal.
[+] [-] thenomad|9 years ago|reply
I love static sites. They load incredibly fast, they're extremely cheap to run, the security hassles go way down and, as another commenter mentioned, they work for the long-term. And these days there are plenty of solutions for reader feedback that don't require you to run a Wordpress instance.
[+] [-] proyb2|9 years ago|reply
I use Swift Sever Side framework for backend and Sveltejs (https://Svelte.technology) for front-end JavaScript to handle just about anything that jQuery could and a lot easier to run same compiled modules code on Nodejs and web browsers with Rollup.
Less worry than running frameworks that will encounter bugs that may take time to resolve e.g. React, Angular 1/2 have enormous issues since 2014/2013, Swift and Sveltejs are a great combination. I roll, I roll, I roll out in 2017!
Pssst. DOM are fastest when you only need to update a small portion of your code and majority of use case with DOM manipulation is fine.
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] kowdermeister|9 years ago|reply
My gut feeling is that 57% is a huge number if you assume that they don't use a CMS. I don't think that's manageable by the average owner with static site generators. None of my clients would be able to update their site with GIT + text editors. It's more likely that there's some kind of backend system that the survey was unable to identify.
[+] [-] ohyoutravel|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] michaelbuckbee|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hashtagMERKY|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danesparza|9 years ago|reply
I love Hugo because it's a single binary, it's fast as hell when generating a static site, and it's easy to understand (and got great docs).
After I generate a static site, it's hosted on S3 (with a Cloudflare caching layer). The whole thing costs me pennies a month.
[+] [-] sheraz|9 years ago|reply
I think the difference between Processwire and Wordpress has been in the developer experience. The former (Processwire) is better organized, direct, and addresses the most common things you would want to do in the CMS. Wordpress docs just feel like an afterthought and more of an index of things.
yeah, i'm a big fan.
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] OberstKrueger|9 years ago|reply
[1]: https://caddyserver.com/docs/markdown
[+] [-] kilian|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Rabidgremlin|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SuperPaintMan|9 years ago|reply
It's hacky, but the rest of my site uses AppEngine and I really don't feel like exposing a unsupported hack job of PHP to the open internet. Had a few issues that required modification to the themes, but that was the only issue ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
https://theblackbox.ca
[+] [-] kijin|9 years ago|reply
It's a total mess. Business logic and HTML snippets scattered everywhere. Layers of caching to make the whole thing load in less than 0.03 seconds on cheap shared hosting. I'm sure I do a much better job for paying clients, but somehow never get around to fixing the decade-old garbage that runs my own site.
At least it doesn't have any SQL injection vulnerabilities :p
[+] [-] cdevs|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lando2319|9 years ago|reply
I started out as a WordPress developer, so once I moved to more advanced programming I kept using WordPress, but it was so annoying to have to keep up with the updates that I decided to try Jekyll because of their static site nature.
Static sites are awesome because they're wicked fast, and they work in perpetuity. I'm a huge fan. If you can handle a little coding I think it's much preferable to a CMS.
[+] [-] jkereako|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] floatboth|9 years ago|reply
It uses the Micropub protocol for posting/editing/deleting (I also made a frontend editor app for Micropub: https://github.com/myfreeweb/micro-panel), Webmention for talking to other websites, Git+JSON to store content.
I don't like the PHP/MySQL CMS world at all, but I use that at work. We use MODX Revolution (with some sites still on Evolution).
[+] [-] codygman|9 years ago|reply
Second, have you looked at clckwrks[0]? It aims to specifically dethrone wordpress by making plugins that are provably safe. I think this is a viable way to attack wordpresses stronghold, though I think being able to do things like write plugins based in javascript or other popular languages when an existing provably safe plugin doesn't exist will also be necessary.
Last time I tried clckwrks it was a bit hard to get setup (this was pre-stack) so I don't blame you for rolling your own solution.
I do wonder what you think of clckwrks and the idea of exploiting Haskell to make provably safe plugins so you can create a large ecosystem without the security issues that wordpress plugins have.
[+] [-] hunvreus|9 years ago|reply
If your site has a lot of content, you'll have to use a few tricks to retain fast builds [1].
We had to build a lightweight CMS[2] for regular folks to update content, and a pro hosting alternative to GitHub pages that supports multiple branches, authentication, redirections, proxying...
We're Open Sourcing the CMS part; shoot me an email if you use Jekyll and are interested in testing it out.
[1]: https://wiredcraft.com/blog/make-jekyll-fast/
[2]: https://i.imgur.com/4rkHKhY.png
[+] [-] rcdmd|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] peller|9 years ago|reply
https://github.com/gatsbyjs/gatsby
[+] [-] cauterized|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Jugurtha|9 years ago|reply
A friend had difficulties with Wordpress + Woocommerce I set for them and I figured everyone knows folders.
I'm tinkering with it from time to time. (As you might notice, I'm also learning web dev, CSS and stuff)..
https://github.com/jhadjar/boutique
[+] [-] dmerfield|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cmac2992|9 years ago|reply
Its basically a node/express app with a nice backend. I really enjoy it, incredibly flexible. I've even used it without a front end as internal CRM.