A SvelteKit template for building CMS-free editable websites(editable.website) |
A SvelteKit template for building CMS-free editable websites(editable.website) |
TypeScript support can be hit or miss, and there could be more improvements around the stores API
One thing that isn't clear from reading the GitHub page — do all visitors end up downloading the editor payload or do only admins who are logged in get that?
My general approach to this is considering website development as "minimal web app development". Think of it as developing your very own little Facebook thingie, where people could log in and post and edit stuff, without thinking about the technicalities.
My feeling is that, thanks to abstractions like Svelte, this is not super difficult anymore and my hope is that in many cases this approach could replace integrating a CMS. At least for me it feels much more natural like this, and really all I have to know is some HTML+CSS, the SvelteKit API and SQL to model my content. Just like in the old days, where you didn't have to depend on 100 things to make a website. :)
Thank you Nils Kjellman for the patch. https://github.com/michael/editable-website/pull/8
I hope to work in one of such orgs some day because the most common experience I've witnessed was pain.
And things don't improve when you throw more money at a CMS. There's an entire industry of enterprise CMSs (yearly license in five figures) and their users aren't any happier with their CMS than WordPress users.
Moving everything to a CMS or something like this, seems a lot of work. I'm looking at just using server-side includes for those sections, but haven't found a good editing frontend for that. Just exposing a single file in a git repository and deploying that via some build infrastructure (e.g. build.sr.ht) would be another method. Some live content preview would be nice in either case...
A surprising number of sites don't even need new pages dynamically, like blog articles, but just rather minor edits to a small subset of the content. Small businesses, medical practices etc.
You can set it up so it edits a few markdown files, and these files are used in your static build.
Is an Astro template/integration a possibility? I'd love an editable static site that triggers Netlify builds. I actually have an Astro project on Netlify CMS that I wouldn't mind moving to this.
I wrote about it here in more detail: https://letsken.com/michael/how-to-implement-a-web-based-ric...
I found that useful when i worked with https://www.getlektor.com/ years ago. In lektor the dynamic part runs on a users desktop machine, but it of course wouldn't need to.
Anyways, at this point I'm just happy that my 0.2 vCPU / 512 MB Node.js instance on Northflank survived a HackerNews spike at 60% CPU max.
Build steps aren't evil. For most projects, you never even touch them. You use a project template and then you're done.
What you get in return is an amount of work no human can do by hand: type-checking, tree-shaking, cross-browser shims, image optimization... it's a huge list.
At this point, I wouldn't hire someone who thinks build steps are a waste of time. Programmers should know the value of automating complex manual tasks.
What sticks with me in a way that I don't love is that this and many other modern, simple-ish solutions to having a lightweight CMS still relies on some Postgres config. I'm being picky, but I want a DB without having to think about the DB at all. Just templates plz.
Also, it's the best demo I've seen in a while. Completely obvious to use.
My only problem with this as an alternative to Wordpress are the claim "Put your cursor anywhere and make changes" or "Your website will do exactly what you need it to do". I see that I can clearly change text anywhere, but how do I change the template or the layout? How do I add a three columns section?
Making changes in a visual editor like Elementor is extremely easy even for non-technical people, which is why it's so mainstream.
It's not a page builder for non-technical people. But as a developer or agency you can offer your clients, that you build a website for them, that they can then self-maintain without any friction.
I could build the basic layout, and let the customer fill it in and change it without a need for supervision.
Looks like it uses Postgres: https://github.com/michael/editable-website
For this reason I find the demo a bit confusing.
The repo notes that persistence requires editors to in with the (shared?) admin user and password.
Although the pitch is "CMS-free", this is a Postgres- and S3-backed content management system.
The in-place editing is extremely cool.
Glad you like the in-place editing. I'm also for the first time happy with the experience. You can press CMD+E for editing and CMD+S saving, and there's no layout shift, so it's really convenient for quick edits. :)
It's like a great mix of TinaCMS and Dropbox Paper.
My experience after 25 years of web development is that often examples > libraries. Not always true, but I think particularly for websites it works well and gives you full control over every pixel to be rendered.
For now just click "Done" to bring back the toolbar (the selection will be preserved).
Clicking the menu Blog link gives me a 500 error.
Cool! Postgres and an S3-compatible object store area are both listed as requirements, so you may want to update that.
So by "does not depend on additional software", does that means I can just use the filesystem?
If you want to go commercial, you could develop a platform for others to contribute building blocks and templates. Something that will pave the way for a no-code tool.
If you or your end-users prefer to also define layout and style in a visual interface, that's what CMS and No-Code tools are made for.
As for earning money: I was thinking of creating specific templates (e.g. an editable artist portfolio website) and sell those at a one off price (in a similar way that Tailwind offers paid website templates). But I'm also really happy to do custom work. Like someone comes with a design and I execute it using this approach. I think there's much value for people who want a website but have not technical experience and still want to keep the content of their website up to date themselves. I could offer training for frontend developers to build editable websites with Svelte.
Haven't used Typescript much with it, though.
Beyond that, pretty much every Typescript project I've been introduced to suffers from just as many bugs as codebases that use plain JavaScript. Strict typing at compile time doesn't replace conscientious development practices and rigorous testing.
"view-layer code" is underselling how complex many modern webapps can get. When you've got 10+ engineers across 2+ teams running around in your 30,000+ line codebase, TypeScript offers a lot of benefits and makes overall iteration speed much much faster.
You don't need TypeScript for small/personal projects though. As long as everything fits in your memory, you're fine.
TL;DR - Svelte's codebase will move to JSDoc types but still use TS.
To be clear - Svelte will still have full support for TS, nothing is changing for users of Svelte.
To me JavaScript does a great job (if you know what you are doing) and if you're working on a reasonably small project.
Interesting take. I always look at it like "now you have a better solution for your modeling needs".
I just don’t get the issues. TS is great, and generating good types directly from TS is easy with API extractor[0]. It makes it so easy.
The resistance to me from the community boggles me and I’m sad Rich feels this way