I'm a big fan of Jekyll (and more recently, Gatsby), and I think you're correct in saying that in most cases where a CMS is used, a static site generator would be a better option.
However, I see a couple of problems standing in the way of more widespread adoption of static site generators:
1) I've never seen a static site generator that non-technical users felt comfortable with. Programmers like terminal interfaces. Your average user in 2018 has probably never opened the terminal.
2) Possibly even more significant, I don't think the people making the choice to use a CMS for a simple business-info or blog site are aware of the trade-offs that they're making, or of the benefits that a static site will provide down the line. For a lot of small business owners I've spoken with, Wordpress is basically synonymous with "web presence."
I wonder if there's a market for a web-based GUI like what Wordpress provides, but which runs jekyll under the hood and uploads the files to s3 or something like that. Is this what companies like Squarespace and Wix do?
The first point is why I built Jekyll+ [1], which I initially built for the new Starbucks' website [2] (which runs on Jekyll). It supports multilingual content and we're now adding a whole bunch of new features (you can check the TODO list in the README [3]).
We also have a pretty neat solution for site generation/hosting (JekyllPro) which is rolling out next month.
Using these two, none of the contributors realize they're using Jekyll. It's not as user-friendly as Squarespace, but it's pretty darn good.
The project I work on, Netlify CMS (https://www.netlifycms.org/), is almost precisely what you described in your last paragraph.I say "only" because it only officially supports GitHub as a backend at the moment, from which you can deploy to a host. (I'm also currently working on supporting more backends, so that will change soon.) The CMS is an open-source (MIT license) CMS built as a static web page which connects to an API for an arbitrary backend from your browser and edits the content stored there - from there, you can build the content with whatever static site generator you want. This lets you build sites that non-technical users can keep up-to-date without tying yourself to a specific tech stack for the actual website.
Please put that description somewhere on the site. I tried to try out Netlify CMS there times because I love Netlify the service but couldn't figure out what it is any of those times.
That said, it didn't help that you don't support Gitlab, which is where all my sites are, and which is the more important reason why I couldn't get it to work.
Yup, improving backend support (and refactoring the backend API to make developing custom backend support easier) is currently my top priority. Initial GitLab support (without the editorial workflow) is very close to being complete - I hope to be releasing an initial PR this coming week if all goes as planned. My latest update in that thread is here: https://github.com/netlify/netlify-cms/pull/517#issuecomment...
I'm a huge fan of Netlify, everything you guys do is great.
We (Graphia) took a similar approach for our document management system. Essentially it looks and acts like a regular CMS but it sits on top of a git repo instead of a database; and publishes via Hugo.
It's not intended to be a fully-fledged CMS but the API would support it without much work; the UI is definitely the time consuming portion.
http://www.graphia.co.uk for anyone who is interested, not quite ready for prime time just yet. Soon.
That sounds really similar to Netlify CMS, especially the use of Git for content storage+version history and the focus on a decoupled UI for editing content. It's really cool to hear from somebody exploring the same space! Git as a backend for content is a really interesting concept that's worked very well for us so far, and I'd be interested to hear how you're implementing that and what issues you've run into. The internationalization approach you describe on the features page is pretty intriguing as well - that's a feature that we should improve our support for in Netlify CMS.
Feel free to ping me using the contact info in my profile or at @benaiah in our Gitter room (https://gitter.im/netlify/NetlifyCMS) if you're interested in discussing this elsewhere.
Why not use wordpress as the backend for your static site? The user can create pages and posts like normal and once they are done you can build the static page from the wordpress api.
Some players are moving into this space. Headless CMS providers like Contentful or Prismic let you build a very nice content entry UI and asset manager. Then you can consume content dynamically via the API or set up triggers to build the site statically whenever content is updated.
They definitely appeal to IT teams which is a very different sales pitch than you would see for most enterprise CMS products, but rest assured the actual product is very user-friendly. The content entry UI is very straightforward and has easy to use hooks to live preview like any other CMS.
I spent a lot of years working in tech consulting and did a lot of CMS integrations. We desperately wanted to push clients to Contentful and away from ornery beasts like AEM, but Adobe can sell AEM by saying it's part of the "marketing cloud" and that it's magic power is in user engagement and analytics and whatever other marketingspeak lies. Contentful was the developer favorite, but it was hard to convince businesses it was in their best interests even though it totally was.
There definitely is a market for a product like this. I think the best thing would be a native app with deep git integration. Engineers can see the entire project and edit templates while end users get a GUI to drag and drop those templates to make an article. The output from the user is encoded to either json or protobufs, and then passed through a function that outputs html which is then uploaded to s3. Everything would be under version control so you could just operate as if it were a custom designed webpage. You could fund development by having a store that takes a cut of templates that other people create.
I would work on this if I wasn't already running another startup.
Publii looks promising, but while it's "open source," the source is all wrapped up in an Electron app that could easily be reclosed at a later date.
There's also Netlify CMS, but I haven't done much with it. I think the GitHub requirement puts people off, and work on the GitLab--which has free private repositories--support issue is slow.
What we need is something like Publii that's not packaged in a way that's obviously meant to make closing the source easy. That story is too old, and too common, to believe their intentions are good.
With something like Hugo, you only need a single executable and all you have to do is decide on a theme, write Markdown files, and compile it on a shell/cmd/powershell with a command you can save in a text file for later reference.
Imho if you are really wanting to write a blog and host it yourself, this should not be too hard to learn. Wordpress doesn't install itself automatically, either.
However, I see a couple of problems standing in the way of more widespread adoption of static site generators:
1) I've never seen a static site generator that non-technical users felt comfortable with. Programmers like terminal interfaces. Your average user in 2018 has probably never opened the terminal.
2) Possibly even more significant, I don't think the people making the choice to use a CMS for a simple business-info or blog site are aware of the trade-offs that they're making, or of the benefits that a static site will provide down the line. For a lot of small business owners I've spoken with, Wordpress is basically synonymous with "web presence."
I wonder if there's a market for a web-based GUI like what Wordpress provides, but which runs jekyll under the hood and uploads the files to s3 or something like that. Is this what companies like Squarespace and Wix do?