New comment by frereubu in "Static site generators need less rigid content APIs"

I've been building websites since the mid 1990s (including everything from small personal sites to large content-managed sites for the BBC), and I now run an agency that builds WordPress sites for large non-profit clients. I've been looking at SSGs myself recently, and much as I like the idea of static sites I've come to very similar conclusions to the author. There are two observations I have about this from my perspective:

1. People often forget that "making your own" also entails a huge risk for a client. What happens if you go bust? We're constantly being contacted by organisations who were talked into a proprietary CMS and then left in the lurch when either their relationship with the agency broke down (which often happens in this situation because the agency know the client is locked into their CMS) or a company's lone developer left.

2. No content editor should have to use anything much beyond a Word-like interface, even if there are separate TinyMCE fields for separate areas in a page template. Even Markdown, which seems elegant and simple to developers, can cause all sorts of issues with non-technical content editors - and most clients outside the development bubble are non-technical. I feel like the lessons learned at the beginning of CMSes - for example, you shouldn't expect anything but pain from expecting clients to edit HTML - haven't been fully understood.

The one end-user benefit from SSGs seems to be that the site is packaged as static files and is therefore faster and easier to deploy, but is that really worth jumping through all these hoops? If any of these SSGs wants to reach a broader market, they'll need to have a WordPress-like interface that then publishes the static files and somehow manages to cope with dynamic things like search and filtering in an accessible way.

One service I've been interested by is https://www.hardypress.com/ (just tried it out, not affiliated in any way) which effectively takes a WordPress site and publishes a static version. They cope with form submissions in a similar way to Netlify (I think) and also deal relatively with querystrings that trigger a filtered listing. I think this is the only direction I'd be comfortable with for my clients because it gives them all the benefits of a user-focused CMS with a static site generator, while allowing them to take the site to one of the many other WP agencies if they choose to.

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