What’s the best CMS for Static Websites?
Find out what is the best static website CMS system — that are also free!
Index
- Pico (Added 5th Nov 2017)
- Hexo
- Publii
- Sculpin
- MetalSmith
- GatsbyJS
- Yellow
- AbeCMS
Specific Wordpress Static Generators
- WP Static HTML Output
- Simply Static
Links with trials and information. (well some anyway…)
Top sites (with a bit of a review to help you)
Pico
What is it?
Pico is a flat file CMS system that runs from Markdown. I their words “stupidly simple, blazing fast, flat file CMS”…
I like Pico. It’s small and agile and is ridiculously simple to grasp. There are not clever installation dependencies, composer scripts (unless you want to), and other paraphanalia. Just copy the files down to your server and run.
This system takes markdown files and creates your website for you.
If you want more flexibility you can use the TWIG template system and even include HTML, PHP and anything else you need. I LOVE simple systems and on the face of it — this is a simple system.
- Last news update: Not sure — could not find a blog!
- Runs of ‘anything’ really :)
- Has themes — yes and plugins — yes, API — sort of
Pop over to Github and get a copy and see what you think
Hexo
What is it?
A fast, simple & powerful blog framework
- last news update: 28th Feb 2016
- video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ARted4RniaU
From Giraff Academy (free tutorial videos for techies) - runs off: node.js (nodejs.org — node -v to check install) and git (git-scm.com to install — git version to check install)
- Use sudo npm to install (comes with node.js) — npm install -g hexo-cli
- hexo -v to verify installed.
- Wordpress migration tool: yes. (if issues see: https://github.com/hexojs/hexo/issues/1753)
- Plugins: yes — Themes: yes — API: yes
Publii
What is it?
Publii is a new kind of blogging experience; an app for building static websites directly on your desktop
- Still in Beta
- Creates: conventional websites locally and uploads to live
- Latest news update: 11th Oct 2017
- Runs off: Local app for windows and mac
- Uses: Handlebars
Sculpin
What is it?
Sculpin is a static site generator written in PHP. It converts Markdown files, Twig templates and standard HTML into a static HTML site that can be easily deployed.
- Last blog post: 19th May 2017
- Pretty much PHP / Twig and Markdown (nice!)
- Plugins and Themes: Not sure but they have a LOT of websites using it. They do have a warning:
Theme support for Sculpin is still highly experimental…
MetalSmith
What is it?
An extremely simple, pluggable static site generator.
Wow, these guys have a massive home page — pretty much the whole site is on one massively long page — a lot of scrolling!
- Very simple as quick to setup system
- Creates pages from .md source in folders
- Very fast!
- Plugins: yes — Themes: sort of
GatsbyJS
What is it?
Static site generator for React
GatsbyJS has a great looking website with a really good breakdown comparison of CMS systems; which shows the differences between Gatsby, Jekyll, Wordpress and Squarespace.
I found this to be a really good breakdown and had some good descriptions regarding each area for comparsion — answering the questions of why you would prefer to use one system over the other.
Another thing I liked about Gatsby is the way it addresses those folks using Windows for Development. So many static site generators are obsessed with Linux or Mac environments. In the real world this is not the case and it’s refreshing to see these guys address those who develop on Windows.
So, so far, I like Gatsby. They have a really well thought out website that has a lot of information — but easily understood and carefully explained — including their tutorial.
- Latest news/blog post: October 2017. Interesting article on migrating a blog to Gatsby
- Supports AMP and CDN’s: yes partially
- Themes and Plugins: Sort of — see their demo of their starter kit or this one, or this one using Bootstrap. The Wordpress plugin looks interesting and could be a way of moving from Wordpress to a decent static site generator.
- Create pages: various way, and yes you can use Markdown.
- Pull data in from multiple sources using GraphQL
Yellow
What is it?
Datenstrom Yellow is a so-called flat-file CMS and a static site generator.
Create small web pages, blogs and wikis. The focus is on people and that it’s useful for you. No database, no admin panel, no long documentation. Most people don’t need this. Create websites that look and work the way you want.
- Built and templated using PHP
- Themes and Plugins: sort of… Loads of themes on Github
- It has been updated in the last few months (as at Oct 2017)
- Not sure what to say about this except that it looks extremely simple to use, runs off Markdown and is totally in PHP. Get Yellow and play!
AbeCMS
What is it?
AbeCMS — fast CMS that allows in-page editing with template tags, etc. AbeCMS is your new CMS with revolutionary self-descriptive templates.
Allows Live editing on each part of your site during development dramatically increasing the dev speed
- Latest updates: Very recent — as of this post Oct 2017.
- Markup your html templates with specific tags, and your back-office is ready to go: It’s time to contribute for your users!
- Add a complete workflow of validation and permissions with ease, using the state of the art oAuth2 stack.
- Deploy automagically to Surge, AWS S3, Github.io, or any web server via SFTP
- Create multi-languages, multi-locales, complex web structures in no time
- Add plugins like abe-algolia, abe-elasticsearch… or create your own with just js skill
- Themes and Plugins: sort of… see https://github.com/abecms/abecms
How is data stored?
- Data is created as JSON documents
- An API-first Server to serve your documents as json
- Or a static website generator
- Or both !
WP Static HTML Output — Wordpress Plugin
What is it?
Generates a standalone, static html copy of your whole WordPress website
My thoughts with Static site generators for ‘other’ CMS systems (e.g. Wordpress, Joomla, Modx, etc.), be careful and test carefully. They will do pretty much what wGet or cURL do — sometimes a bit better.
The main things to watch out for are the way the dynamic content is generated as a static page / post. If there are sliders, comments and other dynamic content elements that are loaded via PHP or other server side technology — these will probably have to be replaced and reproduced.
- Last update of the plugin: March 2017
- generates a standalone, static html copy of your whole WordPress website
- auto-deploy to local folder, FTP, S3 or Dropbox
- one site to unlimited export targets
- specify extra files to include in the output (ie, dynamically loaded assets)
- desktop notifications alert you to when exports are complete
- multi-language support (English/Japanese currently)
Simply Static — Wordpress Plugin
What is it?
Simply Static is a static site generator for WordPress that helps you create a static site that you can serve separately from your WordPress installation.
- Last Updated: May 2017
- Simply Static is only able to create a static copy of an entire site.
- This plugin also works on a multisite setup