Working with Static Sites

Chapter 6. Adding a CMS

Brian Rinaldi

Although using static site generators for both large- and small-scale sites has been gaining in acceptance among developers, the experience for content contributors is still generally suboptimal. This is especially true for anyone who is used to editing content using WYSIWYG editing tools in popular blog engines like WordPress and other content management systems. Transitioning from using these content editors to writing Markdown files in a text editor is probably a deal breaker for many companies. Solving this problem can often be more difficult than solving the technology problem, as Stefan Baumgartner describes in his article Using A Static Site Generator At Scale: Lessons Learned:

The biggest challenge in our journey to static sites was getting content editors to work with the new technology stack. You have to be hard as nails if you are willing to leave the comforts of your WYSIWYG editor—you know, those same comforts that drive web developers insane.

Stefan’s solution was to build a WYSIWYG editor for their less technical contributors, but this isn’t a viable option for every project or team.

Beyond the difficulties of editing content, publishing that content is a non-trivial matter for the average nontechnical content contributor. Depending on the setup, they either have to learn to test, build, and FTP or how to commit and sync using something like GitHub to post their content. This can seem overwhelming to someone with a nontechnical ...