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simonwyesterday at 1:08 PM5 repliesview on HN

I expect the bigger risk to dynamic database-backed CMS platforms right now is that AI assistance makes static site generator tools run against a version controlled repository of content less intimidating for most users... and static sites are cheaper to run (especially in this era of badly coded scrapers flooding the internet) and much less likely to fall vulnerable to security problems.

I expect we'll see a further wave of CMS interfaces which provide a nicer editing experience on top of flat files stored in Git.

Maybe the strategic move for platforms like WordPress (and maybe Django too! The Django admin remains a very popular CMS platform) is to invest more in separation of admin editing from serving, such that there's an obvious path to edit your content in the CMS but deploy it as static files.

My own blog uses the Django admin and serves the site via Django (albeit behind a 15m Cloudflare cache to handle traffic spikes) but I have a scheduled GitHub Action that backs up the content to a Git repository: https://github.com/simonw/simonwillisonblog-backup - it's not much of a stretch from that to having the Git repository feed content to a static site generator.


Replies

threetonesunyesterday at 1:37 PM

There's Tina CMS for editing files in Git, but honestly editing flat files is probably the least interesting or complicated part of an enterprise CMS, and IMO there's rarely a good reason to interact with files directly versus a database that publishes files.

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pjmlpyesterday at 1:11 PM

Depends on the company level, on my line of business, what companies care about are headless CMS, with AI workflows, and oriented towards MACH.

Ah, and all of them have partnerships with Vercel, and possibly Netlify.

Sitecore, Contentful, Sanity, Storybrook,...

If anything, they killed the need for backend skills, you get a ready made SaaS, program interactions with AI, and if anything requires backend like logic, it is taken care by Vercel or Netlify functions.

huijzeryesterday at 1:57 PM

> and static sites are cheaper to run (especially in this era of badly coded scrapers flooding the internet)

Is that really such a problem for the average Joe? I'm running multiple blogs via a Rust CMS [1] on the cheapest Hetzner server, and have had no problems with the scrapers or load or anything. Have also gotten to the HN front page without issues talking about that you shouldn't put a site behind Cloudflare since most don't need it [2]. Now of course, for businesses or something who depend on the service to be online, it's different. But I'm talking about regular Joe's blog here.

[1]: https://github.com/rikhuijzer/fx

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45965060

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dedgeyesterday at 11:39 PM

[dead]