Ask HN: Excluding WordPress, what is your favorite for blogs or small stores? - travisby
======
mattkevan
Jekyll or Hugo, hosted for free on Netlify and using Forestry.io or
Cloudcannon as the CMS.

Jekyll is great for blogs and simple brochure sites, go Hugo (heh) if you need
something more complex. Hugo is much faster than Jekyll when running builds on
larger sites.

I'd recommend Snipcart for e-commerce. Recently built a shop with it, using
Jekyll as the framework. I've made a number of online stores with a variety of
platforms and this was the easiest - took about 15 mins. Cheaper than Shopify
too.

Edit: Here's a guide from Snipcart on how to do it -
[https://snipcart.com/blog/static-site-e-commerce-
part-2-inte...](https://snipcart.com/blog/static-site-e-commerce-
part-2-integrating-snipcart-with-jekyll)

(I have nothing to do with Snipcart, just like the service)

~~~
schappim
I looked into snipcart however the admin was slow, and the pricing was much
more expensive then Shopify when at scale (revenues in the millions).

Over the holidays I spent the time to write a Sinatra based replacement for
the Shopify Checkout. There is a big opportunity for someone to do with
ecommerce what Discorse did for forum software.

~~~
sireat
Wouldn't revenues in the millions justify in not having Shopify but some
custom integration with whatever payment processor you are using?

~~~
schappim
Yup, it's absolutely getting to that point, but not for $$$ reasons. Shopify
Plus, their enterprise plan is fixed price. This is why I spent much of the
holidays writing our own custom cart.

------
schappim
A number of our portfolio sites (including
[http://piaustralia.com.au](http://piaustralia.com.au) ) are static html
hosted on AWS S3 + Cloudfront.

The sites are created using Middleman[1], a ruby static site generator which
I've found to be a little bit more flexible than Jekyll.

On our static sites, we grab inventory information as JSONP from a small
Sinatra based service on Elastic Beanstalk with read only access to the DB.
Other than this and the checkout (we'll get to that in a bit), everything is
client side Javascript utilising local storage for the cart state.

We do not host our own checkout. Instead we use Shopify's ancient and way
under-publicised "Cart Links"[2] feature. Cart Links let you pre-populate a
cart and send the user to the checkout if you so wish.

To upload the static files to S3 we use an awesome program called S3_website
which knows how to look for the rendered html from a number of static site
generators, and sync it to S3. It's also smart enough to setup redirects,
invalidate CDN caches and even gzipping content. It's freaking amazing[3].

[1] Middleman - [https://middlemanapp.com](https://middlemanapp.com)

[2] Shopify Cart Links -
[https://help.shopify.com/themes/customization/cart/use-
perma...](https://help.shopify.com/themes/customization/cart/use-permalinks-
to-preload-cart)

[3] S3_website -
[https://github.com/laurilehmijoki/s3_website](https://github.com/laurilehmijoki/s3_website)

~~~
raverbashing
Any good recommendations on setting S3 links for public access? (permissions
wise)

~~~
StavrosK
I'd just use Netlify. Ever since they've changed their pricing to have basic
static sites for free, I'm sold on them and like them a lot.

------
mattkevan
Had a conversation with a potential client about this the other day:

For a small store I wouldn't recommend anything other than Shopify or
Squarespace as they're cheap, nicely designed [0], secure enough and will meet
90% of anyone's needs out of the box.

Once the client is up and running and have figured things out a bit, something
more custom may be appropriate - perhaps a static site with an e-commerce
provider such as Snipcart or Gumroad (as I've mentioned in another comment).

Only when a client has serious cash to spend and serious requirements, such as
integrating with CRMs and fulfilment systems or complex user roles and
permissions should they even begin to consider something like Wordpress or
Drupal - or even Magento (shudder).

[0] My main gripe with Squarespace is that their templates are optimised for
looking fantastic in demos over being usable for more mundane content. Very
few clients are able to produce the quality of photography demanded by the
designs.

~~~
vinhboy
Good comment. Whole heartedly agree. Our job is to give them what they need,
not what we think is cool. I hate it when developers over-engineer their
client's needs. It becomes a costly maintenance nightmare down the road for
everyone.

~~~
mattkevan
Absolutely. I see it a lot, especially in charities and non-profits, and it
makes me angry.

They're sold on platforms which are too complex and expensive, just because
they don't know (or are not informed) how much things should cost or what the
alternatives are.

Like you say, it's our job to provide what people need, and trustworthy
relationships over short-term gain are always more valuable in the long run.

------
technion
Things I hear CMS developers talking about: Constantly applying security
updates. The lack of maintenance on their favourite plugins. Which caching
plugins works the best. How important a CDN is. The need for security plugins,
which themselves are often exploited. The HN/Reddit hug of death. Whether a
host has suitable versions of PHP. "Webscale" being ten users a minute.

I don't get it. I've been using a static site built in Jekyll, which just
works(tm). I recently rebuilt my blog with AMP compliance, and it still looks
the way I want it to.

If you're not Ruby person, there's Hugo as a Go alternative. For blogs, we
really should be seeing the end of maintenance, vulnerabilities, and static
pages are cheaper to host.

Edit: of course, I answered the blog question, but not the ecommerce one.

~~~
berns
I understand most people's enthusiasm with static site generators. But either
they are only building sites for themselves or their clients are very
different than mines. How do your clients edit the site? How do they do simple
things like cropping images for example? And what about forms, newsletter
subscribe forms or contact forms? Do you use a third party service for
everything? I can't see how that is simpler or more reliable.

~~~
ascendantlogic
The omnipresent pitfall of engineers: Assuming that all end users share your
knowledge and skills.

~~~
technion
I look at it the other way around.

The assumption that Wordpress means a client can edit their own site has been
very wrong, for many users. Unless the site is built in Microsoft Word (and
I've seen that done..) they are going to be using a professional for edits,
and hence I refer back to static builders.

~~~
illuminea
That's why we are developing Strattic, which is a static publishing sites for
the popular CMSs like WordPress. This way end-users who aren't techy can
continue to manage their sites in our secure staging area, and the site is
then published live as static. Our company site is running on our platform -
the origin site is WordPress: [https://strattic.com](https://strattic.com).
I'd love to hear feedback, and we're also looking for beta testers.

------
antileet
I use [https://getgrav.org/](https://getgrav.org/) and this is why:

\- No DB. Use a flat file layout similar to Jekyll or static site generators.

\- Offers dynamic features like redirecting and custom routing when you need
it. This isn't possible with a pure static site generator.

\- Decent optional panel to write, edit and manage almost all aspects of your
site.

\- Quite fast once you set it up with good caching.

~~~
therealmarv
I first thought cool. On second look I see it is based on PHP. I'm sure newest
PHP is really fast and advanced but I don't want to invest any of my time on
that language (just my personal opinion). Update: OK, it also runs on nginx.
Made a wrong claim it does not run on it. Sorry.

~~~
theossuary
Well that shouldn't be true. Firstly there is no good reason why any PHP
framework would ever require a specific web server, so the claim seems
dubious. A little reading in their installation guide confirms Grav should
work with any web server:
[https://learn.getgrav.org/basics/installation](https://learn.getgrav.org/basics/installation)

~~~
therealmarv
Yes, you are right! Corrected it.

------
wincent
I made an over-engineered, intricate snowflake for it, for fun:
[https://github.com/wincent/masochist](https://github.com/wincent/masochist)

Markdown content stored in Git, custom indexes in Redis/memcached, data
fetched via GraphQL, rendered with React, published with`git push`.

Not at all the right tool for the job, but I had a lot of fun building it.

~~~
rojobuffalo
Maybe over-engineered, but I really like the result in both the codebase and
UI. I'm just curious about your terminology--how do you distinguish what is a
'snippet', 'wiki', or 'blog' post?

~~~
wincent
Wiki for "reference" material, blog for mostly "long form" writing, and
snippets as a random grab bag of unorganized content (analagous to gists).

~~~
rojobuffalo
Cool, this is exactly the idea I was starting to build from scratch with
almost the same stack. I might substitute "Library" where you use the term
"Wiki". I think wiki is supposed to mean collaborative editing, but I will be
the only one posting/editing (initially at least).

Do you have a mechanism for controlling publish state (like draft, published,
archive)?

Other than honoring the CC license you have for that project, are there any
other concerns you have about using it as a boilerplate? This project will be
focused on sustainable food systems just fyi.

------
mrswag
I generate static webpages from markdown in a < 100 lines bash script. It's
just a for loop using sed, pygments and markdown, hosted on github.

It has a local webserver, spell check, optional image compression, and minimal
dependencies.

I don't get the need of Jekyll or Hugo. They're bloated and it's a pain to
customize so called "themes". I'm OK with 'boring' HTML and CSS.

~~~
allover
It's great you built your own tool and workflow that suits you, but there's no
need to declare things 'bloated', just because they include things _you_ don't
want to use. That's your opinion. Its defaults suit me pretty well, and it's
really well documented.

~~~
mrswag
Bad wording on my side, sorry. My grief is mostly against some prominent
themes that weight 5 MB a page, and feature jQuery to animate the menu.

~~~
allover
Cool, I hear you but Jekyll actually comes with a very minimal theme (when you
'jekyll new my-site'). Heavy 3rd party themes aren't really the fault of
Jekyll.

------
bharani_m
Ghost + Gumroad (selling products) would be a decent alternative.

Other options are to go with static site generators like Middleman or Hugo for
your blog and setting up a shop on Shopify or Sellfy.

As a side note, I have open sourced the code [1] for my shop/blog that is
running at [https://www.authenticpixels.com](https://www.authenticpixels.com).
It is written in Elixir/Phoenix.

[1] [https://github.com/authentic-pixels/ex-
shop](https://github.com/authentic-pixels/ex-shop)

~~~
tomcam
Site runs very fast. Congratulations

~~~
bharani_m
Thanks!

I have tried to reduce the JS & CSS being used on the page. I've only included
the grid and navbar components from Bootstrap's CSS framework and there is
pretty minimal JS involved.

I have used Turbolinks to replace the <body> tag on each request via ajax.

------
dbg31415
If you already think we're going to say WordPress, what do you want to do that
WordPress doesn't do?

I don't like WordPress for eCommerce, but I think it's great for blogs and
content sites.

For eCommerce... just too many variables. Who you want to use for fulfillment,
what other systems you want to integrate with, if you need a staging instance
or customer loyalty software or any of the 50 other things you can integrate.

For content... Ghost is OK. Just... WordPress has thought of everything
already. Plugins, solid UX, extra features you didn't know to ask for... it's
hard for other platforms to catch up.

~~~
weavie
For me, it is quite a shallow reason. I just don't enjoy developing in PHP.

Wordpress is amazing at what it does, but I always dread having to touch it.
There is nothing else that gets close to it (that I have found) in terms of
ease of use for the users, which is why I keep having to return to it. I long
for the day when someone writes something just as good in Haskell (hey, I can
dream..).

~~~
dbg31415
You code so little with Word Press, there's an extension for like everything
you own or do you already. It's more just configuration stuff, right? What are
you trying to do with your new site?

~~~
weavie
I like to really understand what is going on under the hood. If I don't quite
understand how something works I like to read the source code. Also sometimes
a plugin doesn't quite do exactly what I want, or is so large and complex due
to trying to cater for everyone that I just feel uneasy about using it and so
for simple things I prefer to just write a little code that does exactly what
I need and no more.

Plus, I am a coder. And coders code so that's what I do. It's just a
psychological thing...

------
manmal
Craft CMS. It allows you to define a meta model in a convenient editor, and
lets you render out data with a template engine (HTML/JSON/...). The meta-
meta-model consists of a few sensible objects, so it's not just UML rendered
down. It has fine grained access control, so you can define which user can
access what data.

Things like image uploads in the backend (admin) area are solved. E.g you can
setup an S3 bucket that is used for your site's dynamic assets.

Security updates are one-click-installs and I'd say there is at least one per
week.

There are plenty of plugins available, too.

It's a bit pricey (compared to FOSS) if you use it for clients, but you can
develop for free or even host your own website for free with it.

I've used it twice so far, and I enjoyed it very much.

------
kowdermeister
[https://ghost.org/](https://ghost.org/) blogs are really awesome. It's
Node.js based, simple to install. I don't like static generators, that
authoring experience is just not for me.

~~~
shortformblog
I use Ghost for my site [http://tedium.co](http://tedium.co), and I've been
able to do some interesting things with it. I like the flexibility it offers
without the cruft of WordPress.

That said, I do sometimes look longingly at static site generators and wonder
what's on the other side.

------
navs
I see static site tools are still trending. I've used a variety of static site
tools for play but never had a client opt for it. Probably the only static
site I'm currently running is for my local Auckland CSS meetup and that's just
plain ol' hard coded HTML.

For those clients that require a CMS and not specifically a blog, I use
[http://processwire.com](http://processwire.com)

The plugin ecosystem is lacking but I've always been impressed with its
performance and intuitive API. I don't currently run e-commerce on it but
Gumroad would be my first choice if I had to.

~~~
sheraz
I always push Processwire for questions like this. It is very versatile and
makes for a capable CMS / blog / whatever.

I'm planning on using processwire to build a webstore with either Foxycart or
Snipcart.

Just as a starter I will be moving my personal blog over to it just so I can
have one processwire app in production.

------
cryptos
After testing some static site generators I've settled with Hugo and never
looked back. I like especially the fact that I only have a single static file
with no further dependencies. And the speed is fantastic. Hot reloading is
very useful.

------
dualogy
Prefer my own hacked-together static site generator. First iteration [1] was a
mess, next (more-robust cleaner and faster) one is coming along nicely [2] and
should replace [1] "any-day-now"..

(nb. If you need Markdown or restructuredText, this isn't for you for the time
being, writing a few <p> or <h2> tags and the rare occasional <a> link never
much bothered me since ~1998, images/nav have some Haskell-coded "Xtender-
renderers" (simplified and no-recompile-needed custom html 'subtemplates' aka
'controls' coming in [2] though), and for more verbose text-content-only tags
such `code` or `blockquote` it's easy to set up self-expanding short-tags such
as `{X{c:code goes here}}` and `{X{bq:blockquote text here}}` etc.. ;)

[1]
[https://github.com/metaleap/HaXtatic/](https://github.com/metaleap/HaXtatic/)

[2]
[https://github.com/metaleap/HaXtatic/tree/master/__tmp_nu_](https://github.com/metaleap/HaXtatic/tree/master/__tmp_nu_)

~~~
erikb
If you're able to pull it off (i.e. have the time to iterate until it works)
this is probably the best solution for the blogging part. Highest level of
flexibility, a lot to learn, not too hard startegic-wise.

~~~
dualogy
Heh. I think static-site-gens are the new "PHP/ASP CMS": as in, every small-
time coder writes their own from scratch now ;D

v0 "works" already, it's just stupidly inefficient and too messy code to
properly refactor (vs rewrite from scratch)..

~~~
erikb
Trust me when I tell you that refactoring is nearly always the better
solution. Consider that rewriting from scratch doesn't necessarily yield a
better result than what you have already.

------
xiaoma
Squarespace is the clear option. It's even faster to get set up with than WP
and in the past 2 years has become a truly viable competitor.

~~~
apapli
I really like Squarespace too, but just be wary if you have a site information
architecture that needs to go beyond 1 level of menus. It doesn't handle sub-
levels well.

I'd also really appreciate it if they let you save a template page (eg for a
landing page) for easy re-use. Re-creating specific landing pages and thank
you pages for each campaign we run is a bit of a pain as what I really just
want to do is change a few paragraphs of text and update an image or two for
these.

~~~
deutronium
The lack of multiple levels of menus is something I noticed with Ghost too,
when I last played with it.

Also I'm wondering, with Squarespace, it's not clear whether you can install
on your own server or not

~~~
nsp
You cannot self host square space.

------
mbrock
My default choice is XML with XSLT and a simple Makefile to generate the HTML.

~~~
therealmarv
Haha I like that. But I like also XSLT. Many people think we are strange! :P

~~~
mbrock
I think XML, for all the hate it gets, is so much nicer for extensible markup
than all the weird template languages people invent daily...

And XSLT/XPath are really nice too. I just need to figure out how to shell out
to external programs from libxslt's xsltproc and then I'll be able to do
anything I want...

------
sgdesign
If this is for a client that can't manage a static site themselves, then I
would probably look into splitting out the content editing part. For example
services like [https://www.datocms.com/](https://www.datocms.com/) let you
publish to a separate static site generator.

~~~
thirdsun
I just discovered Dato when I was looking for a CMS for Middleman and it looks
fantastic. Expensive, but it seems to be an excellent choice for client work.

------
at-fates-hands
All good recommendations here, but I'd add a few more. .

I say take a look at Keystone CMS
([http://keystonejs.com/](http://keystonejs.com/)) - it's a Node based CMS and
is really easy to work with and has tons of options to customize as you need
it.

My other recommendation would be to use Spike -
([https://www.spike.cf/](https://www.spike.cf/)) (from the same guys who built
Roots) along with rooftop CMS
([https://www.rooftopcms.com/](https://www.rooftopcms.com/)) or Contentful CMS
([https://www.contentful.com/](https://www.contentful.com/))

------
wanda
Perch is a fantastic solution for both content and commerce sites:

[https://grabaperch.com](https://grabaperch.com)

there's also Flatmarket which I've been meaning to recommend for someone else
to try:

[https://christophercliff.com/flatmarket/](https://christophercliff.com/flatmarket/)

[https://github.com/christophercliff/flatmarket](https://github.com/christophercliff/flatmarket)

Most websites I make for people I make with Wordpress or Ghost because the
client likes them. My own site is static html — I wrote the current version by
hand, but I have since made a rudimentary Perl script to quicken the process.

------
marwann
I used to work a lot with Wordpress in the past, but as projects tend to be
more and more specific, I found Middleman[1] more flexible and for structured
content (eg. directories) or for generating pages automatically, using a YAML
structure is very convenient.

For my online shop, I use Shopify[2] as it is a side project and I did not
want to spend a lot of time writing / setting it up. Shopify proves very
convenient and includes a blog if needed.

[1] Middleman - [https://middlemanapp.com](https://middlemanapp.com)

[2] Shopify - [https://www.shopify.com](https://www.shopify.com)

------
altharaz
It depends on your skills/needs.

Do you want to customize everything with ease? Do you have someone who can
maintain the security of your blog and eventually add new features later? =>
WordPress on your own hosting

Do you want to use a very classical theme? Do you want a complete service with
no skills required and no maintenance? => Wix or WordPress.com

Do you want to customize everything? Do you have someone to maintain the blog
on a regular base? => Jekyll on GitHub or on your own hosting

Shall you need to sell things online with the blog, WordPress can be augmented
with Shopify, meanwhile Wix has already this feature.

------
zie
Sphinx. Lots of documentation uses it, so it can do most anything, plus if you
are familiar with Sphinx, you will be _hopefully_ more likely to write your
documentation as well :)

------
danieldk
Jekyll/Hakyll for blogs. They are both very customizable, you can write
Markdown, and since they produce static pages you have one security worry
less.

------
sharmi
I use python based Nikola, a static blog generator. This i s for my personal
blog. The killer features for me are using jupyter to write blog posts and
custom urls for posts (which seem to be missing from pelican, the only other
blog generator to support jupyter). The documentation is good for the usual
tasks. In the extremely rare case when the documentation is not sufficient,
the code is really easy to understand.

------
darylteo
As in the previous thread, I'll just cautiously mention OctoberCMS. I don't
know if they will do the job, I'm evaluating it for my client projects for
project briefs starting with "we'd like a CMS... "

It is just as Open Source. However, it's newer, but has just hit stable
recently. A strong plugin system. Purposed built for CMS from the ground up,
built on Laravel with all the nice things.

------
ctcliff
I developed a static site generator for e-commerce called Flatmarket:
[https://github.com/christophercliff/flatmarket](https://github.com/christophercliff/flatmarket)

It lacks some of the features you'd get with a dedicated backend service but
it's truly static and costs about $0.004/transaction on AWS Lambda (not
including Stripe's take).

~~~
sgallant
I love the artwork for your demo site. Where did you get it?

[https://christophercliff.com/flatmarket/](https://christophercliff.com/flatmarket/)

~~~
ctcliff
An old stock art CD-ROM by Redouté.

------
wishinghand
The flat file Kirby CMS is a great option. The starter template has a basic
blog implementation, it's easy to start modifying to look like what you want,
and it has a basic admin panel for adding new pages/posts that's client
friendly, unlike a static site generator. If you're not into making your own
theme, there's a site for buying them called getkirby-themes.com which most
other flat file CMS options don't have.

It used PHP and can run quite quickly if you setup caching and PHP 7 on your
host. Content is generated from txt files that can have any number of fields
(titles, subtitles, body, asides, meta info, etc).

As for ecommerce, I use Ecwid. It's a separate login to manage products, but
it's also free for 10 or fewer products. After that it's a very reasonable
monthly fee.

------
thestepafter
I personally have really enjoyed working with Statamic. It is built on Laravel
and super easy to customized.

------
latteperday
If it's for you, probably hand code. If it's for a client, try
[https://pulsecms.com](https://pulsecms.com) It allows you to create static
sites with a CMS layer on top that clients can edit easily. Static sites all
the way baby!

------
max_
I use Lektor [http://getlektor.com](http://getlektor.com)

------
lucabenazzi
Webflow + DPD (digital downloads), or Webflow + Shopify (physical goods) If
your CMS is not supposed to do anything particularly fancy and if you don't
want the annoyance of dealing with techy staff, Webflow is currently the best
website builder that I know. It's a visual tool and that saves you lots of
time, especially if you are tech savvy. They are just releasing a CMS API that
is going to make it even more flexible.

If you are selling real goods, Webflow integrates with Shopify very
efficiently. If you are selling digital downloads, I'd consider DPD, which is
in many ways better for digital downloads since it was born just for to do
that. I am currently using it and I am very satisfied.

------
eb0la
I really love CityDesk from FogCreek software.

That was the static CMS used my Joel Spolsky.

I downloaded a long time ago, and had to buy it because it worked very well.

Now it is EOLed and I am looking for something similar, but cannot find it.
Tried Jeckyl but I am not convinced, although I really love ruby.

~~~
ufmace
Yes, even Joel doesn't recommend it anymore...
[https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2016/12/09/rip-
citydesk/](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2016/12/09/rip-citydesk/)

------
fdik
Have my own blog software, YBlog:
[http://blog.fdik.org/yblog2.tar.bz2](http://blog.fdik.org/yblog2.tar.bz2)
Probably it's not feasable for most people, because it is heavily relying on
YML2 [http://fdik.org/yml](http://fdik.org/yml) and vim
[http://vim.org](http://vim.org)

For CMS I really can recommend
[http://mezzanine.jupo.org/](http://mezzanine.jupo.org/)

It also includes a Blog, is in Python/Django and is fulfilling all needs from
very small to very large sites.

------
scandox
I think the comments here shoq that there is a massive opportunity for a
Wordpress Killer. Nothing I've seen listed could replace Wordpress for the
majority of non technical clients I would hand over a CMS managed site to.

~~~
illuminea
We believe the platform we are developing, Strattic, could fill the gaps - it
publishes WordPress (and other platforms) as static sites. That way non-
technical clients still get their CMS, and developers get a production static
site. Best of both worlds. [https://strattic.com](https://strattic.com)

~~~
scandox
Actually that sounds like something that I could use. How are you going to
handle plugins? Or will you not? I suppose you could support plugins that
provide content transformations...but not plugins that are more dynamic...

------
maxt
I love Chyrp[1] but have since moved away from PHP and am looking into static
solutions like Jekyll, or Ghost[2].

I always make sure to proxy Ghost through a CDN because it lessens the load on
my server.

For digital products, I use Sellfy and Selly[#]

[1] [https://github.com/chyrp/chyrp](https://github.com/chyrp/chyrp)

[2] [https://github.com/TryGhost](https://github.com/TryGhost)

[#] [https://sellfy.com/](https://sellfy.com/)

[#] [https://selly.gg/](https://selly.gg/)

------
cyphar
For my blog, I personally use Flask+Jinja with a custom markdown parsing
setup[1]. Sure, it's not the best thing in the world but there's no database
and in my experience it works pretty well. I've been meaning to set it up so
that things are cached properly, but the machine is beefy enough to handle the
current load. And let's be honest, if my blog gets HN'd I'll be too excited to
be annoyed by having to switch to a static setup.

[1]:
[https://github.com/cyphar/cyphar.com](https://github.com/cyphar/cyphar.com)

------
TBloom
If you're a fan of React, Gatsby is an excellent project to check out:
[https://github.com/gatsbyjs/gatsby](https://github.com/gatsbyjs/gatsby)

------
dombili
I have a private blog that I write for my own to better my writing skills.

I use Ulysses (the app) with a custom style (CSS) and extract my posts to an
HTML file. I then upload the HTML file and the CSS file, which Ulysses also
extracts, to S3, so then I can view it and read it from time to time. I
realize this isn't the most elegant solution, but it works for me because I
have very specific requirements from a CMS and I haven't been able to find
them in any of the CMSes out there. (Most of them don't even have a clue as to
what "minimalism" means.)

------
anngrant
Squarespace can be a good alternative to WordPress. Both have the potential to
help you create beautiful and powerful websites. Though WordPress is more
flexible & customizable especially with plugins. I've just downloaded a cool
WP theme for my website - [https://www.templatemonster.com/wordpress-
themes/monstroid2....](https://www.templatemonster.com/wordpress-
themes/monstroid2.html) . It's a multipurpose theme that can be used for
creating any website you need.

------
cygned
Bonsai ([http://tinytree.info/);](http://tinytree.info/\);) because no other
static page generator has been so easy yet customizable.

~~~
schappim
What can it do that [https://middlemanapp.com](https://middlemanapp.com)
can't?

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JoshTriplett
For blogs and personal sites, I'd suggest a static site generator such as
ikiwiki (for self-hosting), Branchable (hosted), or Github Pages (hosted, but
no SSL support for custom domains).

In addition to SSL support, ikiwiki offers several other useful features for
constructing a blog or news site, such as "take all the pages under blog/* and
emit a page with the last 10 in reverse order, including an RSS feed".

------
pvdebbe
TextPattern was my favourite back when, even if it featured very awkward ideas
(all content, styles, maintenance goes through their web interface to database
-- good luck with unix tools to compare, diff and patch changes).

These days static content is the only valid answer in my books. I don't want
to spend my nights worrying about rotting PHP/Ruby/NodeJS runtimes behind the
scenes.

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jeshan25
Jekyll/Lektor as a static CMS. Deployed to Amazon S3 backed by Cloudfront CDN.

All of this gives me: ease of deploy, AWS's reliable infrastructure, ultra
fast website (can easily score 90+ out of 100 on google's pagespeed insights
tool), delivered over SSL with a free certificate on my own domain, "infinite"
scale, etc.

All of this can literally run on cents of a dollar per month.

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Giorgi
There is none, that's why everyone it trying but failing to use static page
generators, which are nowhere near the WP functionality

------
richie5um
I use Hugo for static blog generation and GitHub pages for hosting. Works
well, and, apart from the domain registration, is free.

------
koolba
Harp is pretty good: [https://harpjs.com/](https://harpjs.com/)

If you're already comfortable with the node.js world it's easy to hack it if
you want to support something new as well. Out of the box it requires very
minimal setup to get things going.

------
iamslash
I think jekyll is the best thing to blog something. And I recommend to hosting
it on github for free.

------
postscapes1
Webhook.org

A great open source CMS based on Firebase that outputs a static site.

Easy to do relationship fields, create JSON templates, customize for clients.

Only issue is developers have stalled out on project dev and basic support.
Would love to pay more if someone could fork and take up the charge.

------
madc
We're huge fans of Bolt ([http://bolt.cm](http://bolt.cm)) for small and
medium sized websites. Its based on Synfony (PHP) and Twig and allows super
easy creation of content types by configuration.

------
jimnotgym
For blogs HTML, although I soon wish I used a CMS

For e-commerce, I never want to see Magento again (used at company where I
work) and would look squarely at Shopify next time

For both uses any self hosted CMS feels like you spend too much time as
admin/configurator

------
kyasui
I'm a big fan of SiteLeaf -
[https://www.siteleaf.com/](https://www.siteleaf.com/)

CMS for static sites (Using Jekyll under the hood)

------
pwenzel
I have grown to love Jade/Pug templates, compiled with npm scripts. You can
build your own site generator to convert pug templates with the simple command
`pug --watch`.

------
milankragujevic
Custom CMS in PHP. That's what I always use for everything.

------
yranadive
If you just care about hosting code and snippets I'd try GrepPage. It lets you
search your stores from the command-line and the web.

(Disclaimer I'm the creator of GrepPage).

------
stephengillie
Part of my Dropbox file tree is synched to a server hosting it with IIS - so I
just throw a flat file in my /HTML/ folder and link to it on Gilgamech.com.

~~~
amorphid
(It sounds like you have Dropbox installed on the actual server. If that is
the case, disregard...)

Dropbox is doing away with allowing you to publicly share docs, so now/soon
one can't use Dropbox for hosting static websites anymore.

~~~
stephengillie
Yeah, that's one of the issues I avoid by directly hosting the files, instead
of using them as a web host. I'd use Neocities if I didn't have my own server.
(My server is just my old gaming PC, on my home internet.)

------
mariani
I'm on Hugo CMS myself but considered just using medium.com at one point but
that won't help you for the e-commerce part.

------
cjoh
I've really enjoyed OctoberCMS: [http://octobercms.com](http://octobercms.com)

------
diegocerdan
I'm looking for a CMS that outputs static generated pages with a progressive
web app approach. Any references?

------
callesgg
Opencart:

The code quality is not good, but it has loots of good functionality and
making small modifications is fairly simple.

------
tomw1808
Pimcore.

[https://www.pimcore.org/en](https://www.pimcore.org/en)

------
pmorici
For a small store that is super easy to setup I would use Weebly. You can also
do a blog through it.

------
galfarragem
Is there already a 'Jekyll' on Crystal? Jekyll with hugo speed, that would be
awesome!

------
my123
Orchard works quite well after it is setted up properly.

------
jwatte
HTML and JavaScript and Postgres.

------
anotheryou
For personal use or client proof?

------
zakki
Have your tried prestashop?

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samnwa
Allthink is pretty good.

------
muro
Blogger :)

------
justinlaster
I've recently been using Hexo for blogs: [https://hexo.io/](https://hexo.io/)

------
bbcbasic
Github pages. Free hosting. Just fork a Jekyll template and off you go.

------
Zelmor
I sort of like werc, the framework behind cat-v. I would only imagine it for a
personal site/portfolio, however, and not for commercial or business use.

------
joshkpeterson
I used kirby for a brochureware project and it went really well.

