Static, so you don't need coding skills right?

- 2 minutes read - 402 words

So static websites, means there is no code? Could not be more wrong…

From the JAM stack website they provide some best practices and example. There are choices to be made, and each have advantages and disadvantages, making it easy but not sophisticated or sophisticated and too complex.

Long over are the days of me designing web sites, so I needed a setup with Themes capabilities and a well stocked offering of choices in that area.

I went with Hugo, as the CMS, the setup looked easy enough and straight forward to use. Playing around it used good practices to structure and set up the site and provided templates/themes.

But the experience left me a bit struggling. I’m more then able to deal with a code editor, writing markdown, and executing a website build command. But it did seems like I was catapulted back in time, and not benefiting from 20 years of evolution. Especially on the server side and UI/CMS aspects.

There must be another way… And after some searching, I came across Forestry.io, a clever UI/UX on top of the static CMS system. It supports Hugo and other established and up coming ones.

And that pushed me towards best practices again, the web site is basically code, the CMS compiles it into an output format that can be served/consumed by systems/users. So if what I’m doing is writing codethen Forestry.io is proving an IDEfor me to edit it, and gently pushed me to start using gitfor version control, and more specifically Github to manage all aspects of access and distributed nature of handling my website code.

So first three steps:

  1. Create an empty website with Hugo
  2. create a git repository and commit the newly created website into a Github repository
  3. log into Forestry using Github, and set up the website by pointing to the repository

Sounds simple to list this, took this old-school guy some getting use to (Subversion anyone 😉).

Then selecting a Hugo theme and adding this as a submodule to your repository. Setting up the config file, and finalising the setup in Forestry.

Now, you have content versioning set up, a CMS and a site generator. This brings you into a state where you can contribute the content.

So indeed, no coding yet, only plumbing and tinkering. And, as with anything, the more often you do it, the more natural and normal it feels.

Next up, ‘publishing’