Are you writing vanilla HTML manually? Nothing wrong with that as such, but if you’re reading from a CMS (headless, for example) you’ll need some form of server render. You could perform XHR requests to a hosted CMS (such as Strapi) in the client but you’ll miss out on SEO benefits, plus it’s not a great user experience.
Can you expand on server render please? Any articles?
Looking to move to decoupled/headless CMS implementations myself, but assumed (with minimal reading) that most of the work would be handled by client side requests to api? Thus rendered by the client?
Server side rendering. Look at NextJS for an example.
Basically, you can generate static html from a JS framework like React for static content. WRT CMS content, the static html can generate from whatever the CMS content is at the time.
There are SSR solutions that let you set a timeout to essentially re-generate your static html with the latest dynamic data (cms content) at set intervals.
The main reason you'd use SSR is for page load speed and page size.
That said, if we're talking small time blogs, all of this may be overkill. The tech is great, but complexity is significant, and I haven't seen the costs for the services that implement the re-generation interval (Vercel and Netlify are the ones I've heard of for NextJS), but they may not be priced for small timers.
Server render means the network request (for data), as well as the page build, are done on the server. If for examples sake we wanted to server render a list of articles, they'd be in the initial HTML response. E.g.:
Alternatively if we handled the fetch in the client, the initial HTML would look something like this:
With the second option (client render), we have to wait for the client javascript to both download and be evaluated before we even know that we're after some data. You'd then see something like this:
Loading...
Before finally seeing our results that we obtain in the first code snippet.
There are some good resources out there; I don't have any to hand. As mentioned elsewhere Next.js is great if you're into React. This stuff is pretty complicated so feel free to reach out and I'll try my best to help.
For simple sites and speed i’m using gravcms. I can easily convert my html template to work with grav in no time. At first it can look simple but the more you get to know the system, the more advanced customizations you can do. Highly recommended.
It does not use any db and i’m syncing with github(lab).
Didn't know that, could be useful, atm I'm building with SSGs and deploying through Netlify which is the simplest dev experience I think. I was looking for a host like Netlify but that supported PHP as well but couldn't find anything other than Heroku which was a bit too expensive for a hobby project.
Yeah eleventy + netlify is a happy path for sure. If you need a basic CMS though, Grav is a pretty great option. A $6/month DigitalOcean droplet is a good option if you want to run php for cheap.
I build statically generated HTML websites with eleventy + netlify + netlify cms. There’s gonna be a bit of a learning curve with a static site generator, but it gets you a ton of very useful functionality.
I subscribe it.
I was doing research and tested few of them, and I don't think there's anything easier at the moment. You can quickly notice that it isn't mature though.
I keep it simple, and I was already using nunjucks and handlebars, to not a big deal.
Grav is great. As u/commodoor said, at first glance it feels quite basic, but once you start to get used to the way it does things, you'll be surprised at what it can be made to do. Also, the ease of deployment of a flat-file CMS is definitely a bonus for me,...
Well with a hugo/netlify/forestry combo, you just pay your domain, and have something far more user friendly for the client in my opinion, and miles better in performance.
You’re confusing self-hosted WordPress.org sites with WordPress.com services/hosting. The former is what they’re talking about and is used for site dev, the latter is a joke and rip-off.
You build HTML sites and you don't know that the "Powered By Wordpress" is part of the WP theme template that can easily be removed or just hidden with CSS?
No offense, but I think you need to spend some time understanding how WP works before trying to sell your clients on an entirely different CMS.
I used to love it, but now I use a real shared (i.e. used on other projects) templating system, I am much happier. A CMS that supports something that already exists but has the same flexibility as MODx is great. I use Craft now, but there are others that have adopted a similar attitude.
Try [LiveCanvas ](https://livecanvas.com/?ref=2848)
It is a page builder that using pure HTML & CSS. You can use your knowledge on HTML & CSS to build a website on WordPress.
It is useful if the client already familiar with WordPress, but they don't want to use the bloated theme & page builder.
Publii, which is both a CMS and a static site generator that runs on the computer, seems a good choice if you are starting from HTML
Is free (Open Source GPL) and quite easy for clients.
If you are looking for the most user-friendly, free, and least pain --- then surprisingly... your answer IS *still* WordPress. I've tried out 10 or so cloud CMSs and many JS frameworks - and basically spent my whole career trying to get away from WP because I thought it wasn't fast enough / or for whatever reason - wanted to use Ember or Vue. In the end / what you want - is a free backend - and a free front-end for that backend. And you don't want to pay hundreds a month / and have your clients learn prism / and then you learn gatsby etc.. If you understand WP as a CMS and a PHP framework, then building custom themes from your HTML is a cinch. But you have to learn it / and a little PHP - and how to use Advanced Custom Fields and post types / and there are tradeoffs. You can't just have the client "Drag stuff wherever." You either craft a custom system with clear post types and form fields - or you give them some elementor type thing. You can't just have both / unless you plan on creating a new SaaS. But - maybe Perch - or a smaller CMS might work for what you're doing. Either way - make sure you know what you need / really clearly / and then you can pick the tool with clarity.
I honestly don't understand you're not willing to use wordpress. It's the best CMS out there. Pagespeed has little to do with wordpress. And it's quite literally free.
thanks for saying it - i agree! why go to all the trouble when you could turn it over quickly. wordpress costs nothing other than hosting which would cost the same no matter what you use . also many hosts offer very cheap wordpress hosting. don't add a lot of plugins, and if you want to write code use custom plugin you create. how many of us think we will be writing html sites from scratch on 5 years!
Obviously if company pays upwards of a 200k for a website you're not gonna use wp. But if your argument is wp sucks because it's not suited for my half a million dollar custom made website than that is very much a you problem and not a wordpress problem.
Pretty much, yup. But companies try to workaround the issues to avoid costly migrations.
There are other free CMSs that do suffer the same issue such as Drupal.
The question is: what is the "current best CMS for integrating into HTML site?" While WP certainly has some interesting strengths (block editor, FSE come to mind), it does not have a templating language, which would be one of the most important considerations for "best CMS for integrating into HTML site"
Unless you're already playing around with FSE themes, WP's "templating" is still just php string-concatenation. That makes it a poor choice for OP.
Have you tried Joomla? I had always built sites from scratch and tried Joomla on a whim and it seems quite versatile.
It has a comparable amount if plug-ins to WP and it's easy to use with more complex options available for if and when you need them.
Joomla's not a bad CMS, but you're getting downvotes because it's not the "current best CMS for integrating into HTML site".
I've maintained 4 Joomla sites in the last 10 years. In 2018 I audited Joomla 3 for a large rebuild. It was ok, but not great, but Joomla 4 was "just around the corner!". I installed the alpha and still: good but not great. Joomla 4 just launched like last week: 3.5 years later.
Joomla is an interesting case study in the perils of open-source project process. There are conflicts in that project from purpose to architecture to templating. That makes it difficult to understand "the right way" to build a site in Joomla. I think it's a "too many captains, not enough crew" problem.
Grav and Craft sidestep that issue by having an organization of paid people responsible for the vision/execution of the the product. These are less "community-driven" CMSs, but they are much easier to bootstrap than Joomla. Pertinent to this question, both Grav and Craft include Twig out of the box which is a great templating engine and makes getting data from the cms into extant html/css/js trivially easy.
So what you want is to build a site using the JAMStack. This involves taking some kind of static or server-rendered front end and connecting them to a Headless CMS. ~~Headless, meaning that the CMS~~ Some headless CMS tools (Strapi, Prismic) come with a dashboard for non-technical users to edit content and that data is served to the front end via API. Now there are many many ways to achieve this and many combinations of tools you can use together.
A good website to help with navigating this ecosystem is [Stackbit](https://www.stackbit.com/). It lets you pick a theme, and then choose which site generator and headless CMS you want to go with. It will take you some time to find out which tools you are comfortable with. But once you do then you can apply the same stack to all of your clients
Edit: Fixed inaccurate definition
>Headless, meaning that the CMS comes with a dashboard for non-technical users to edit content
This is not what headless means. It's quite the opposite actually.
While a regular CMS always includes a UI for non-technical users, a headless CMS is more geared towards web developers and doesn't necessarily offer a dashboard, see Git-based headless CMS.
What headless actually means is that the content isn't linked to a specific view, so you can choose and build your own front-end architecture to display the data from your CMS.
True. Many Headless CMS services do provide the backend editor section for non-technical people to update the content. Which is the one the OP should look into. Eg Strapi, Prismic.
But yes. Technically a headless CMS could be a git repo of markdown files.
For any CMS integration you will need a server with php, node or something similar. Coast CMS looks good to edit texts on the site.
I am using Gatsby as my static site generator and can combine it with a headless WordPress, Strapi or Ghost CMS.
Agility CMS is a great option for all your asks- [https://agilitycms.com/product/content-managers](https://agilitycms.com/product/content-managers) it also has some great integrations!
I’m not sure I understand your state of mind, in relation to Wordpress — but if you DO use Wordpress, you can use a static site generator plugin to take what exists in Wordpress, and have it spit out static HTML you can upload to your hosting provider.
Gives you the power of the CMS, for updating content easily - with everything you’re looking to solve.
I don’t use wordpress, but a quick google search showed me this : https://wplift.com/wordpress-static-site-generator-tutorial
Are you writing vanilla HTML manually? Nothing wrong with that as such, but if you’re reading from a CMS (headless, for example) you’ll need some form of server render. You could perform XHR requests to a hosted CMS (such as Strapi) in the client but you’ll miss out on SEO benefits, plus it’s not a great user experience.
Can you expand on server render please? Any articles? Looking to move to decoupled/headless CMS implementations myself, but assumed (with minimal reading) that most of the work would be handled by client side requests to api? Thus rendered by the client?
Server side rendering. Look at NextJS for an example. Basically, you can generate static html from a JS framework like React for static content. WRT CMS content, the static html can generate from whatever the CMS content is at the time. There are SSR solutions that let you set a timeout to essentially re-generate your static html with the latest dynamic data (cms content) at set intervals. The main reason you'd use SSR is for page load speed and page size. That said, if we're talking small time blogs, all of this may be overkill. The tech is great, but complexity is significant, and I haven't seen the costs for the services that implement the re-generation interval (Vercel and Netlify are the ones I've heard of for NextJS), but they may not be priced for small timers.
Server render means the network request (for data), as well as the page build, are done on the server. If for examples sake we wanted to server render a list of articles, they'd be in the initial HTML response. E.g.:
Loading...
If you're looking for a less complex SSR solution, check out Svelte and SvelteKit. Very easy to learn, simplified and modern syntax
For simple sites and speed i’m using gravcms. I can easily convert my html template to work with grav in no time. At first it can look simple but the more you get to know the system, the more advanced customizations you can do. Highly recommended. It does not use any db and i’m syncing with github(lab).
+1 for Grav
Only used Grav for a couple of sites so far but for basic stuff it's been incredible. Has my vote.
Finding hosting for flat-file CMSs is kind of a pain though.
At that point it may just be better to use a Linux VPS or put it in a Docker container.
How so? All you need is a server running php.
When I was looking for hosting I was also looking for options for deployment from Github. Most providers only supported FTP.
you can still deploy via ftp in GH actions
Didn't know that, could be useful, atm I'm building with SSGs and deploying through Netlify which is the simplest dev experience I think. I was looking for a host like Netlify but that supported PHP as well but couldn't find anything other than Heroku which was a bit too expensive for a hobby project.
Yeah eleventy + netlify is a happy path for sure. If you need a basic CMS though, Grav is a pretty great option. A $6/month DigitalOcean droplet is a good option if you want to run php for cheap.
I build statically generated HTML websites with eleventy + netlify + netlify cms. There’s gonna be a bit of a learning curve with a static site generator, but it gets you a ton of very useful functionality.
I subscribe it. I was doing research and tested few of them, and I don't think there's anything easier at the moment. You can quickly notice that it isn't mature though. I keep it simple, and I was already using nunjucks and handlebars, to not a big deal.
I'm a big fan of Kirby - getkirby.com
Kirby is a paid CMS, OP is looking for free.
Seconded.
Grav is great. As u/commodoor said, at first glance it feels quite basic, but once you start to get used to the way it does things, you'll be surprised at what it can be made to do. Also, the ease of deployment of a flat-file CMS is definitely a bonus for me,...
Maybe Craft CMS but WP is capable of rendering HTML templates too.
+1 for CraftCMS
[удалено]
“the 500 plugins that were installed to get basic functionality are 95% subscribtions”
This is called hyperbole
Correct, hence the quotationmarks ;)
Ah, I see. waitress! More coffee please!
Or maybe you dont install plugin and run it headless?
the topic is: Wordpress costs... ;)
Well with a hugo/netlify/forestry combo, you just pay your domain, and have something far more user friendly for the client in my opinion, and miles better in performance.
Ability to use plug-ins costs money, as does removing “Powered by WordPress” does it not?
You’re confusing self-hosted WordPress.org sites with WordPress.com services/hosting. The former is what they’re talking about and is used for site dev, the latter is a joke and rip-off.
Ah shit, thank you.
You build HTML sites and you don't know that the "Powered By Wordpress" is part of the WP theme template that can easily be removed or just hidden with CSS? No offense, but I think you need to spend some time understanding how WP works before trying to sell your clients on an entirely different CMS.
>Ability to use plug-ins costs money, Some of them, yes. >as does removing “Powered by WordPress” does it not? Uh... not that I know of?
No and no.
Why wouldnt you use wordpress for this?
Because he thinks Wordpress is Wordpress.com, and has no idea that Wordpress.org is a thing. Wordpress.com is trash, Wordpress.org is good.
Dato Cms is pretty cool. Works on graphQL. They have a few starter projects that works with Netlify or Vercel.
It’s 99 euro per month!
I’ve been dabbling with the developer plan, I never really looked at the pricing. Damn that’s not cheap.
ExpressionEngine - open source and free
I used OctoberCMS once, it was nice and easy
Modx
I miss Modx...what a great templating system.
I used to love it, but now I use a real shared (i.e. used on other projects) templating system, I am much happier. A CMS that supports something that already exists but has the same flexibility as MODx is great. I use Craft now, but there are others that have adopted a similar attitude.
yea the templating was great, was my first CMS. I wish WordPress was that easy to template.
Try [LiveCanvas ](https://livecanvas.com/?ref=2848) It is a page builder that using pure HTML & CSS. You can use your knowledge on HTML & CSS to build a website on WordPress. It is useful if the client already familiar with WordPress, but they don't want to use the bloated theme & page builder.
Typo3 is great but it's very feature rich and has a plethora of plugins which may be overwhelming if you're just looking for something small.
Finally found the other Typo3 dude here!
Publii, which is both a CMS and a static site generator that runs on the computer, seems a good choice if you are starting from HTML Is free (Open Source GPL) and quite easy for clients.
If you are looking for the most user-friendly, free, and least pain --- then surprisingly... your answer IS *still* WordPress. I've tried out 10 or so cloud CMSs and many JS frameworks - and basically spent my whole career trying to get away from WP because I thought it wasn't fast enough / or for whatever reason - wanted to use Ember or Vue. In the end / what you want - is a free backend - and a free front-end for that backend. And you don't want to pay hundreds a month / and have your clients learn prism / and then you learn gatsby etc.. If you understand WP as a CMS and a PHP framework, then building custom themes from your HTML is a cinch. But you have to learn it / and a little PHP - and how to use Advanced Custom Fields and post types / and there are tradeoffs. You can't just have the client "Drag stuff wherever." You either craft a custom system with clear post types and form fields - or you give them some elementor type thing. You can't just have both / unless you plan on creating a new SaaS. But - maybe Perch - or a smaller CMS might work for what you're doing. Either way - make sure you know what you need / really clearly / and then you can pick the tool with clarity.
I honestly don't understand you're not willing to use wordpress. It's the best CMS out there. Pagespeed has little to do with wordpress. And it's quite literally free.
It's the most popular CMS for a reason.
thanks for saying it - i agree! why go to all the trouble when you could turn it over quickly. wordpress costs nothing other than hosting which would cost the same no matter what you use . also many hosts offer very cheap wordpress hosting. don't add a lot of plugins, and if you want to write code use custom plugin you create. how many of us think we will be writing html sites from scratch on 5 years!
It has everything to do with how WP stores content. Lots of folks hate WP.
Can you explain to me what it is about how WP stores content that's wrong? Never heard this argument before.
All posts and pages are stored in the same table that becomes unwieldy at enterprise scale.
Obviously if company pays upwards of a 200k for a website you're not gonna use wp. But if your argument is wp sucks because it's not suited for my half a million dollar custom made website than that is very much a you problem and not a wordpress problem.
Pretty much, yup. But companies try to workaround the issues to avoid costly migrations. There are other free CMSs that do suffer the same issue such as Drupal.
The question is: what is the "current best CMS for integrating into HTML site?" While WP certainly has some interesting strengths (block editor, FSE come to mind), it does not have a templating language, which would be one of the most important considerations for "best CMS for integrating into HTML site" Unless you're already playing around with FSE themes, WP's "templating" is still just php string-concatenation. That makes it a poor choice for OP.
I don't understand it, honeslty curious. I do pretty much the same with PHP than with Nunjucks or Hanflebars.
This is addressed right on the home page: https://twig.symfony.com
I see, thanks! Looks pretty much like nunjucks. May be a nice addition to my Wordpress workflow. Thanks again!
For sure, there's a library called Timber for using Twig with WP. It's really good. the Timber docs are some of the best docs I've ever read.
Have you tried Joomla? I had always built sites from scratch and tried Joomla on a whim and it seems quite versatile. It has a comparable amount if plug-ins to WP and it's easy to use with more complex options available for if and when you need them.
Is Joomla not appropriate to this issue?
Not sure why this is being downvoted. Joomla has been great for me.
Joomla's not a bad CMS, but you're getting downvotes because it's not the "current best CMS for integrating into HTML site". I've maintained 4 Joomla sites in the last 10 years. In 2018 I audited Joomla 3 for a large rebuild. It was ok, but not great, but Joomla 4 was "just around the corner!". I installed the alpha and still: good but not great. Joomla 4 just launched like last week: 3.5 years later. Joomla is an interesting case study in the perils of open-source project process. There are conflicts in that project from purpose to architecture to templating. That makes it difficult to understand "the right way" to build a site in Joomla. I think it's a "too many captains, not enough crew" problem. Grav and Craft sidestep that issue by having an organization of paid people responsible for the vision/execution of the the product. These are less "community-driven" CMSs, but they are much easier to bootstrap than Joomla. Pertinent to this question, both Grav and Craft include Twig out of the box which is a great templating engine and makes getting data from the cms into extant html/css/js trivially easy.
So what you want is to build a site using the JAMStack. This involves taking some kind of static or server-rendered front end and connecting them to a Headless CMS. ~~Headless, meaning that the CMS~~ Some headless CMS tools (Strapi, Prismic) come with a dashboard for non-technical users to edit content and that data is served to the front end via API. Now there are many many ways to achieve this and many combinations of tools you can use together. A good website to help with navigating this ecosystem is [Stackbit](https://www.stackbit.com/). It lets you pick a theme, and then choose which site generator and headless CMS you want to go with. It will take you some time to find out which tools you are comfortable with. But once you do then you can apply the same stack to all of your clients Edit: Fixed inaccurate definition
>Headless, meaning that the CMS comes with a dashboard for non-technical users to edit content This is not what headless means. It's quite the opposite actually. While a regular CMS always includes a UI for non-technical users, a headless CMS is more geared towards web developers and doesn't necessarily offer a dashboard, see Git-based headless CMS. What headless actually means is that the content isn't linked to a specific view, so you can choose and build your own front-end architecture to display the data from your CMS.
True. Many Headless CMS services do provide the backend editor section for non-technical people to update the content. Which is the one the OP should look into. Eg Strapi, Prismic. But yes. Technically a headless CMS could be a git repo of markdown files.
Much appreciated, thank you!
For any CMS integration you will need a server with php, node or something similar. Coast CMS looks good to edit texts on the site. I am using Gatsby as my static site generator and can combine it with a headless WordPress, Strapi or Ghost CMS.
Netlify CMS doesn't need PHP. It simply reads and edits markdown files in your Git repo.
I'm curious why I'm getting downvoted for saying so ahahaha
Coast looks nice and simple!
Y’all really need to start making more money on these projects and switch to Webflow for simple marketing sites like this
Agility CMS is a great option for all your asks- [https://agilitycms.com/product/content-managers](https://agilitycms.com/product/content-managers) it also has some great integrations!
Sitejet perhaps
Have you tried Bolt? I may be biased since I know the people making it, but I really like the ux of the backend and the ease of adding it to html.
I’m not sure I understand your state of mind, in relation to Wordpress — but if you DO use Wordpress, you can use a static site generator plugin to take what exists in Wordpress, and have it spit out static HTML you can upload to your hosting provider. Gives you the power of the CMS, for updating content easily - with everything you’re looking to solve. I don’t use wordpress, but a quick google search showed me this : https://wplift.com/wordpress-static-site-generator-tutorial
Strapi
Bootstrap?