Monica Macomber

Posted on Dec 9, 2019

What non-CMS tools would you use to make a small but growing website?

#discuss #webdev #help

I'm making a website for my husband's construction company and the initial features will be:

A static home page
Blog posts that he can create and edit

But over time I'd like to add:

More pages
A dashboard for clients and employees, ideally available offline
Complex forms

My first thought is to start with the Hugo static site generator and add a React app later for the dashboard and forms.

But what tools would you choose?

I'd rather not lock myself into a CMS and I think that would more headache than help anyway. Thanks!

Top comments (24)

Phil Ashby • Dec 9 '19 • Edited

I had similar needs of my own, and chose:

Hugo for site generation
Content managed in Github (private repo)
VScode for manual editing of markdown and configs
Self-hosted, because I already did that and like to own stuff (also pain!)
Github webhook to trigger redeploys
Netlify CMS to provide a nice GUI, avoiding the details of gitflow for most things and not imposing it's own ideas on content structure / format (I have less-technical friends)
netlify-cms-oauth-provider-go to connect my self-hosted site to Github without sending credentials to Netlify, although I needed a couple of fixes.

Current test site phil.ashbysoft.com/hugo-test/

Td Baylis • Dec 12 '19

Speaking of Netlify, I was gonna ask: how about combining headless with WordPress? I stumbled upon this article on Netlify benchmarking a WP site pre/post-headless switch and the results are pretty impressive.

Netlify WP headless CMS article

Have you thought about a headless multisite (not sure if you are planning on servicing different companies, but this could add merit to something like WP if you go the headless route)?

drmikecrowe • Dec 12 '19

One of the downsides with headless WordPress is where you host WordPress so you can access the posts via API. I've looked at Gatsby + WordPress, and it's pretty slick. However, a free WordPress.com account doesn't let you get the posts via API as best I can tell. I suppose you could run it locally, though

Monica Macomber • Dec 12 '19

Someone else suggested a headless CMS too, I am considering it now 👍

Si • Dec 10 '19

Is there any reason you don't want to go for a CMS? The best thing you could do, to avoid reinventing the wheel, is to use a CMS that will help you move on if you want/need to.

I'm an avid user of Ghost CMS and would recommend giving it a look. The very worst case, you outgrow their templating language and use it as a headless CMS with React...

Monica Macomber • Dec 10 '19

Mainly because:

I want to keep things lightweight, simple and easy to customize.
I used to make Drupal, DNN, Wordpress, etc. themes and they're great tools but they can easily become bulky and unwieldy.
As the website's primary maintainer, I'm not going to need the themes or full editability that a CMS provides.

You've got me thinking though, I wonder if it would make sense to use a headless Ghost (lol) to generate blog posts and Gatsby or Hugo or whatever for the rest of the site.

Si • Dec 11 '19

I completely understand why you wouldn't want to use the templating of a CMS. If you want full customisation ability and are a web developer, it makes sense to want to make it yourself.

But I would suggest a headless CMS :) it reduces the burden on you to add new pages etc, and empowers your user base to do it themselves.

Find one that has RBAC baked in 😊 I know ghost does, but not sure if you can utilise in with headless mode.

Monica Macomber • Dec 11 '19

Cool, thanks for the tips! I’ll look into that 👍

Si • Dec 11 '19

No worries! Good luck and hope it all goes well.

If you need any help, give me a shout 👍

Jacob Evans • Dec 10 '19

Sounds like currently, you could start off pretty vanilla HTML, JS, and JSON. Using a lot of static JSON. Could just deploy anywhere though I suggest Netlify or Firebase... Heroku is still good too 🙂

Eventually moving towards other tools as you need them and decide what you like.

Jacob Evans • Dec 10 '19

Gatsby might be well suited for this or the future features.

Avalander • Dec 9 '19

I had to do a simple static webpage recently and I went with plain html and css. The only fancy thing I did was keeping the content in a json file and adding it to the html files with mustache because it had to support multiple languages.

Paweł Kowalski • Dec 9 '19 • Edited

I was looking into just this recently, for my friend, and the best i could figure out (that could be later managed by totally non technical person) was:

Github pages as hosting
Publii as static site generator

Im not sure forms will be possible, but i would use things like formspree, or any other service like that, to handle that part. Its very easy to use.

Monica Macomber • Dec 9 '19

Oh I haven't heard of Publii, thanks!

Jarod Peachey • Dec 10 '19

I would use GatsbyJS as the Static Site Generator, and host it on Netlify. Netlify comes with forms, so you can set those up. Netlify also comes with a CMS option. If you don't use the Netlify CMS, Gatsby easily integrates with other CMSs

Monica Macomber • Dec 10 '19

Gatsby easily integrates with other CMSs

Didn't know that, that's cool.

Monica Macomber • Dec 10 '19

I mean yeah, if your current toolset is doing what you need it to do don't complicate things.

React has been around since 2011 but Gatsby is pretty new. Gatsby might be simpler than you think though, it serves static html same as your WordPress setup.