This website is a static site, by which I mean, it is a folder of files on my hard drive. See static sites for more on that. My editor is VS code, a code editor that I basically live in, so it’s comfortable for me. People who aren’t full-time nerds might like a friendlier interface. Here, I list friendly GUI apps that can edit such a site.
1 Local editors
If your static site system comes with an app that will edit the site, it’s called a CMS (Content Management System). There’s a continuum between that and an editor with integrated static site generator capabilities. There’s no sharp distinction truly between online and offline editors, even though I’ve tried to make one below for simplicity’s sake. Sometimes the local CMS can run on the internet, but that might be unwise or inconvenient.
If you use markdown, the de facto standard markup for plain text blogging, it might be a good start to simply preview that in the old code editor. If you’re using some other specialised markup, good luck, but I won’t assist. Presumably, if you know enough to do that, you know the consequences.
Preview tools, that show you plain text as rendered web-style HTML, make it all nicer.
1.1 Note taking systems with export function
See note taking.
1.2 Stackbit
Now owned by Netlify and seemingly where their frontend development budget goes now. Looks very cool, but the pricing steps price me out. Their free plan is trivial and only handles “one project” and “two templates”, and the next plan up from that is USD 449/month.
1.3 Lektor
Lektor is a static site generator with an integrated local CMS that looks Wordpress-like. For people who are comfortable installing local Python apps and doing command-line stuff, but after that things are easy.
1.4 Publii
Publii is a desktop-based CMS with an integrated site generator for Windows, Mac, and Linux. It’s great that you can just download and go; it sidesteps the git-based workflows. However, things get complicated if the blog is shared between people. At that point, the “simplicity” feels complicated; sharing stuff via Google Drive is crap compared to git. Concealing the complexity doesn’t eliminate it.
1.5 Misc editors
Text editor VS code has built-in markdown preview, which is rough but often helps.
RStudio has sophisticated integration with blogdown blogs.
Blot.im (USD 4/month)
A blogging platform with no interface
Why a blogging platform with no interface? So you can blog with your favourite tools. Blot turns a folder into a blog. Drag-and-drop files inside to publish. Images, text files, Word Documents, Markdown and more become blog posts automatically.
Supports mathematical markup.
Hokus is just for Hugo sites. (Untouched for two years).
As mentioned above, Caddy has a built-in automatic Hugo editor.
Marked is a cheap macOS markdown editor/previewer…
Restview is a previewer for an alternative markup called ReST.
Mou is cheap and looks nice.
And (free! open source! Mou-like design): Macdown
Livereload turns any browser into a preview tool.
Experts can run a localhost dev server which will host a local copy of the website.
2 Online editors
Websites that edit my website for me. Headless CMS seems to be the current term of art for these.
See Content Management System popularity on Netlify if you’d like to follow the crowd on this.
I got perplexity to generate me a feature matrix table for a few popular options to give the vibe.
| Feature | Decap CMS | Strapi | Sanity.io |
|---|---|---|---|
| Type | Git-based, open-source | API-based, open-source | API-based, open-source |
| Hosting | Static, lives in repo | Needs separate hosting | Cloud or self-hosted |
| Ease of Setup | Easiest with templates | Moderate, more setup | Moderate, more setup |
| Editor Experience | Simple, markdown-focused | More complex, flexible | Modern, real-time, flexible |
| Customization | Limited, config-based | Highly customizable | Highly customizable |
| Best For | Small sites, simple edits | Complex data, APIs | Structured content, scaling |
| Netlify Integration | Native | Easy (via API) | Easy (via API) |
| Cost | Free | Free (self-hosted) | Free tier available |
2.1 Decap
Decap CMS (formerly Netlify CMS) is an open source content management system for your Git workflow that enables you to provide editors with a friendly UI and intuitive workflows. You can use it with any static site generator to create faster, more flexible web projects. Content is stored in your Git repository alongside your code for easier versioning, multi-channel publishing, and the option to handle content updates directly in Git.
There’s a fancy starter kit for Decap CMS, called Gatsby Starter Henlo
Experience using Henlo was rough. It does not work out of the box, and I had to figure many small things to make it go: the user sign-up emails don’t point to the CMS, some widgets are marked as compulsory for no particular reason, some needed folders are missing and raise an error, the image pipeline doesn’t work with the default netlify setup, I had to dive into yarn dependency hell, some other things were broken… Maybe it works better on Vercel?
Anyway, I poured 4 hours of my life into that working with an expensive LLM assistant, and it juuuuuuust about works, but I did not emerge from this with a great deal of faith that it is a net time-saver, nor the likelihood that future upstreams updates will be safe to apply.
Once the weird small frictions are deleted, it works well enough and the UI is nice. Overall, I think next time I’ll try Strapi, and give up some autonomy in exchange for ease of use.
2.2 Sanity.io
TBC
2.3 Strapi
TBC
2.4 Tina
Tina, by the creators of forestry.io, is a do-over of that earlier project.
The demos look impressive. User experience last I tried it in 2022 was ungainly; there were many logins required to various different service providers (hosting, code, the CMS) and the default config didn’t actually set up a working site for me, and now I can’t work out how to even delete it. I suspect that it is better now? At least, they have done much work.
Tina is a Git-backed headless content management system that enables developers and content creators to collaborate seamlessly. With Tina, developers can create a custom visual editing experience that is perfectly tailored to their site.
Advantages of Tina
Backed by Git
- Both developers and editors collaborate on a single source of truth making site management harmonious.
- Collaborate on content in real-time with live multi-user editing and change tracking.
Visual Editing
- Get instant feedback with Tina’s intuitive sidebar editor. Allow your editors to preview their changes before publishing live to your site.
- Select and build using your predefined components. Edit text. Adjust the style. Empower editors to edit.
2.5 Prose
“Prose provides a beautifully simple content authoring environment for CMS-free websites. It’s a web-based interface for managing content on GitHub. Use it to create, edit, and delete files, and save your changes directly to GitHub. Host your website on GitHub Pages for free, or set up your own GitHub webhook server.”
It is indeed lovely and minimalist. The subset of markdown that it supports is also minimalist, so this blog looks funky if I edit it in prose. It is now unmaintained, but still works.
2.6 Forestry.io
Forestry seems popular. Discontinued.
2.7 Gitit
Gitit is a wiki backed by a git, darcs, or mercurial filestore. Pages and uploaded files can be modified either directly via the VCS’s command-line tools or through the wiki’s web interface. Pandoc is used for markup processing, so pages may be written in (extended) markdown, reStructuredText, LaTeX, HTML, or literate Haskell, and exported in ten different formats, including LaTeX, ConTeXt, DocBook, RTF, OpenOffice ODT, and MediaWiki markup.
2.8 Misc editor web apps
- Gitbook is a markdown website GUI and publishing toolchain.
- Draft is a collaborative frontend for document editing although not AFAICT publishing.
- Commercial option Cosmic can do lots of stuff, but for multiple users is expensive (USD 99/month).
- Wagtail plus django-bakery together render static sites from a dynamic database. One could fashion an UI out of these parts if enthusiastic.
Cactus is a plain website generator, that features a GUI-ish client, Cactus for MacClasseur attempts to be friendly for more than nerds.