Comment by yallpendantools
13 hours ago
Is there a tenable workflow for the marketing department to use a SSG over Wordpress?
- WYSIWYG editor is table stakes. The lovely folks at marketing once thought I was hacking when I `ps -eaf`-ed in an unresponsive Macbook.
- They "put" images in their post. They don't "upload the image and position it with CSS".
- It's the marketing department so they have to have all sorts of bells and whistles. At the very least tracking, at most some obscure integration plug-in that as an engineer I have no kind words for. Social integrations and "You may also like..." sections also come to mind.
> cheap WP plugins that export the whole site as static to something like FTP or S3, so you can just firewall the actual WP behind an IP restriction and host the actual public-facing site from S3/whatever.
Not that I have extensive WP experience but unless you can name me an actual plugin that has good street cred for being used in the wild wild west, I'm gonna say this is not as easy as you make it sound. For one you just described a very rudimentary data pipeline which someone has to support and maintain even infrequently. Also, speaking from experience, plugins don't always play nice with other plugins. I once tried to export my very basic personal site out of WP to find the footnotes all messed up (I don't know now but back then I handled footnotes with a plugin).
> It's the marketing department so they have to have all sorts of bells and whistles. At the very least tracking, at most some obscure integration plug-in that as an engineer I have no kind words for.
The world would be a better place if you forced the lovely marketing folks to use a SSG and you know it!
I taught several absolutely non-technical people to edit the content of Jekyll websites we maintain together. I made them GitHub accounts, taught them the basics of Markdown, and said that if they break anything I can fix it easily, so they shouldn't worry about it. Sometimes they break things and eventually I fix it. It works great. I can only imagine the horrors I'd have to deal with if there was WYSIWYG!
I think that's exactly the point where the article falls flat. There is potentially a big oppurtunity in building a SSG + CMS solution despite the past failed attempts.
Every few years I go looking for something that's not Wordpress that you could hand to a marketing department, but there is no viable alternative (that's not Drupal).
There's a number of headless CMS solutions for commercial websites. Hosted, multi-user, paid. It's just a different category.