Next up an open source version that lets us host our own version without being trapped in their environment. Once that exists I'd see Squarespace as a viable option for hosting a website. Until then it's just another proprietary WYSIWYG website builder that I don't care about.<p>It's competing in a world where Wordpress is open source and is powering over 26% of the world's websites: <a href="https://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/content_management/all" rel="nofollow">https://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/content_management...</a>
This is insanely cool. No matter how useful/easy your web GUI is, if you have the skill set it's always easier to just do it by hand. Huge congrats to Squarespace, I've already linked this to friends I know that use them and have had customization issues in the past.<p>This is a great opportunity for those who have tried to teach themselves web basics before to actually add stuff to their own sites and really expand their skillset.<p>I've been working on my own thing similar to this for HubSpot, having to edit using a clunky CMS live in production is super scary. I really would like to live in a world where most "we make X easier to do" companies release things like this to let people who know how to do it by hand do it faster.
I'm mainly wary of Squarespace because their entire frontend compiles to YUI which stopped being maintained in August, 2014 (see <a href="https://yahooeng.tumblr.com/post/96098168666/important-announcement-regarding-yui" rel="nofollow">https://yahooeng.tumblr.com/post/96098168666/important-annou...</a>). You don't write YUI, but that's what the code ends up as when you visit the site. I tried out their developer platform early after they launched it, and trying to be productive with it put my brain in a pretzel.<p>I feel as though the SS CMS is overpriced for the features you get, and you're locked into their tech stack & templating which I find leave something to be desired. You can use Wordpress as a CMS and use the API to get the data yourself, or just compile the site to static for free with a plugin, not to mention the large number of paid pluggable CMS solutions for developers. The list goes on, but a local development server shouldn't be this big of news for a CMS developer platform.
Squarespace is awesome, but until they offer SSL certificates I can't recommend it to anyone. This is very unfortunate because it's a great product otherwise.
How can Squarespace even exist in a world that Wordpress supposedly had won? The answer is by winning over the average Joe, who is not a developer or webmaster.<p>I don't get how wordpress.com never became something more attuned to the needs of average Joe...
They need to compete with AWS Lambda / parse next I think. It would be an easy platform for junior javascript dev's to get up and going with a nice looking website that has a backend they can control.
> The first time you access a local template, it will take a while to load as the server fetches the site content. However, once the content has been cached, subsequent requests will complete more quickly until you terminate the server. If you need to invalidate the cache (because you’ve updated your website in the online editor, for example) you can use the ?nocache=true query parameter on any URL.<p>Why would a developer want to see a cached version of a page? A developer using this is actively developing the look and feel of the site so presumably would want to see the live version. This makes no sense and would only cause issues ("<i>But it looked fine when I tested it locally a minute ago?!</i>").<p>> The Development Server is built with Java using the Dropwizard framework. It takes advantage of our open-sourced JSON-T compiler and Less compiler. It’s packaged and distributed over NPM using a set of install scripts that detect the target platform and ensure Java is configured correctly. It’s built to be cross-platform, so Windows, Linux, and Mac developers can all take advantage of the efficiencies the Dev Server provides.<p>If this is really targeted for developers why not just make it a portable executable for each platform (rather than requiring a node install to just fetch the server)?<p>Alternatively, npm should install pip, use that to install cpan, use that to install gem, use that to install docker, and finally load the server from a container (which does the same series of npm/pip/cpan/gem installers run on Ubuntu 16.04 and then downloads a binary tarball of the app).
I had been using an open source variant of this the last few months, which ironically has a similar approach - <a href="https://github.com/NodeSquarespace/node-squarespace-server" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/NodeSquarespace/node-squarespace-server</a><p>This is amazing news though! Hoping the next step is to expose a content manipulation api :)
Very cool. Would love for Shopify to do something similar. These full-featured, hosted CMSs - NationBuilder, Shopify, Hubspot, SquareSpace - offer a lot of neat features, but the development experience ranges from slightly frustrating to plain old miserable.
holy crap. i threw my vote at this request three years ago, and then gave up on squarespace. i have no idea how they managed to be, or appeared to be, a "developer-friendly" platform without it.