- WYSIWYG editor is table stakes. The lovely folks at marketing once thought I was hacking when I `ps -eaf`-ed in an unresponsive Macbook.
- They "put" images in their post. They don't "upload the image and position it with CSS".
- It's the marketing department so they have to have all sorts of bells and whistles. At the very least tracking, at most some obscure integration plug-in that as an engineer I have no kind words for. Social integrations and "You may also like..." sections also come to mind.
> cheap WP plugins that export the whole site as static to something like FTP or S3, so you can just firewall the actual WP behind an IP restriction and host the actual public-facing site from S3/whatever.
Not that I have extensive WP experience but unless you can name me an actual plugin that has good street cred for being used in the wild wild west, I'm gonna say this is not as easy as you make it sound. For one you just described a very rudimentary data pipeline which someone has to support and maintain even infrequently. Also, speaking from experience, plugins don't always play nice with other plugins. I once tried to export my very basic personal site out of WP to find the footnotes all messed up (I don't know now but back then I handled footnotes with a plugin).
Every few years I go looking for something that's not Wordpress that you could hand to a marketing department, but there is no viable alternative (that's not Drupal).
It's wild to me that this post's timeline makes no mention whatsoever of Movable Type, and at one point it links to another author's post titled "A Complete History of Static: The Beginning to WordPress Headless" which also makes no mention whatsoever of Movable Type. Now I feel old :/
So bye bye Hugo.
I could understand someone might refuse learning LaTex but markdown is so simple.
RTF editing sucks badly if you have to include it in your project. No one wants to specifically pay for implementing it but they also expect it to be there.
But each editor also has its issues with generating "backend html" doing bunch of wonky stuff so it works for this editor — using that text in various other places and when you have multiple rich text fields and not single big one to edit whole document is always a major PITA.
Then you get whatever they write to PDF report so for example you have to render HTML correctly there. Amount of ways it can break is basically infinite, getting paragraphs page breaks is non trivial amount of work, especially when customer wants their own layout for the report and not generic looking or just broken layout. So problem is mix and match display of whatever they write in different places.
Not to mention, everyone wants prefilled templates, so they don't start from scratch, oh and your templates need to have dynamically filled in placeholders, now you have to put something like tags that will be updated by your back end.
Maybe you need to send it via API and all kind of companies have WAF on incoming/outgoing data then you have to strip tags.
Yes you can encode/decode, limit options, white list allowed tags, and I was doing that for years now, but amount of things that break is still big and another customer wants you to enable lists when you wanted to support just italic, bold, then you have whole blast radius and feature creep is real.
ROI is just not there, as I mentioned no one wants to specifically pay for all that, we have a really good run telling customers to just use plain text, amount of regressions to be tested, amount of expectations of things to work out of the box once you go with rich text is really high.
Bar to jump to is basically re-implement MS Word — oh did I mention everyone will expect copy pasting from Word to work perfectly - just imagine how much time your customer support has to spend explaining you limited options in that field to be just bold and italic.
Is that what they call WYSIWYG? :eyes:
I crawled own website and downloaded each, and converted to markdown then used static site generator (custom in javascript)
runs on cloudflare pages for free with no downtimes or "fee".
if you want to see result: https://aretecodex.pages.dev/guides/recomposition
Couple of problems:
To edit content i've to use "image paste" plugin and configure its base directory, image path in project setting in .vscode
I lost the comment/upvote feature.
I lost "search"
I haven't found a static generator which has as nice a WYSIWYG interface as wordpress.
* the ability to schedule posts
* a ton of plugins
* a lot of people who know how to use it
* a reasonable WYSIWYG interface
As far as I know, most SSGs fall down on one or more of those dimensions.
jekyll serve --watch --incrementalIts project page doesn't seem to have a screenshot of the post/page editor, but its editor is simplemde so one can just look at it directly: https://simplemde.com/