I know there seem to be two rather large groups on HN, one for proliferation of JS and one against, but at the very least if someone from the latter visits your site, please show something better than <i>an entirely blank page</i>.<p>(I'm speaking of the demo, not the actual site describing it --- although I thought it would be hosted with itself.)<p>As for the idea of turning static content sites into client-side JS-rendered apps, that gets a strong disapproval from me. <i>Why?</i> It's needless complexity (instead of generating the HTML once and storing it on the server, every single visitor has to regenerate it on their machine), bad for accessibility, and very much against the principle of the Web that information should be easily linkable and retrievable. I can understanding using JS to do "app-ish" things that wouldn't be possible with static pages, but this is reinventing the wheel and making it square.
I don't want to discourage you, but I also don't want to encourage the proliferation of websites (web apps---as an alternative to actual desktop software---excluded) that require JavaScript to function at all.<p>Sites using JS only cannot be parsed by standard tools---I can't cURL the page, use wget, use a text-mode browser, etc. This fundamentally breaks interoperability, and limits users' freedom to use the tool/browsers they want to use the web. Users who wish to disable JavaScript to browse the web---be it for security, privacy, philosophy[0], or all of these things---are forced to either enable JavaScript or not read your website (I fall into the latter).<p>I write more JavaScript than any other language. I understand the community, and the rationale. But I know enough to know that I should disable JavaScript when browsing the web (except for select cases, and the software must be Free), and I still use command-line tools aggressively, even for the web. Please do your best to respect those who use the web as it was intended.<p>Keep hacking, but consider fallbacks, too!<p>[0]: <a href="https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/javascript-trap.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/javascript-trap.html</a>
Well how is this intended to be 'content manage'd? Through pr's on github?<p>I think CMS is a poor choice for a name, when there is no interface to 'build' the site's pages. I'd call it something like 'website generator backed by github'.
I guess this technology is promising in a way that it delivers websites to be read by humans only, not the bots. I fail to recognise the practical use of it unless building the most unknown blog in the world, since obviously site on cmsjs is not going to be indexed by google like your ordinary wordpress blog. But, there is something to it. Something important. Blog for humans, readable only by humans, kinda timely in the modern days of senseless content aggregators.
I think this project is cool but it's all of the problems of dynamic sites with none of the benefits. It's like if you took the worst parts of Jekyll (having to redeploy to update content) and the worst parts of a dynamic single page app (rendering delay), and took both parts. There is no benefit to this sort of infrastructure.
Good work, but why is client-side JS needed for a simple blog? I thought it was going to be like Jekyll but Node instead of Ruby (so no JS client-side).
Both the name and description are completely misleading. They suggest that this app is a web UI for managing content and doing what Jekyll does from CLI.<p>But this really is a SPA that can grab markdown files from your Jekyll site hosted on Github or a Apache web server, convert them to HTML and render on client site with JS.<p>What is the point?
Shameless self-promotion:<p>For easy theming, I suggest you to take a look at the Classless Project, which will be super easy to integrate to in your case and will bring many already made themes with it -- and much more to come.<p>The ursprung[2] micro CMS is integrating Classless with success to this day.<p>[1]: <a href="https://github.com/websitesfortrello/classless" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/websitesfortrello/classless</a><p>[2]: <a href="https://github.com/onli/ursprung" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/onli/ursprung</a>
Cool. I'm actually building something very similar @ <a href="http://evanplaice.com" rel="nofollow">http://evanplaice.com</a>. I use Markdown/JSON for all of the content. Markdown files can easily be embedded in a page using the <ng2-markdown> directive I wrote. The source is @ <a href="http://github.com/evanplaice/evanplaice.com" rel="nofollow">http://github.com/evanplaice/evanplaice.com</a>.<p>I'm planning to eventually extract the good bits, and adapt it to work with Jekyll files. Front-matter support is the last major road block.<p>Google shouldn't have any issue indexing AJAX-loaded content. On my site it's the Angular2 router that's really screwing SEO. You can test it out using the 'Fetch as Google' tool.
TiddlyWiki[1], which is a wiki more than a "CMS", has been doing something very close to this for quite some time. I used it for years, but eventually switched back to plain text files for notes.<p>I use Jekyll for blogging and generating my portfolio site too, but right now I can only update my those from my own laptop with my Jekyll install which is not always great. CMS.js would be something else...
My dream would be a simple PHP based CMS for my Jekyll install though.<p>[1] <a href="http://tiddlywiki.com/" rel="nofollow">http://tiddlywiki.com/</a>
This looks interesting. I'm not in love with the name. That said, I love all static site generators. Unfortunately, hosting a static site isn't much fun, so I created <a href="http://www.statichosting.co" rel="nofollow">http://www.statichosting.co</a> to make it easier. It's in beta and we are getting close to launch, but have a few bugs to work out. Would love to have anyone give feedback on it as it develops.
Although this is a cute little project, isn't the name rather misleading?
Instead of a generator isn't this actually a markdown to HTML renderer?