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Publii = Frontpage alternative?

September 5, 2021 at 4:45 am #6283

[anonymous]

I’ve looked at what seems to be an endless number of CMS and blogging apps lately. Everything from the ubiquitous WordPress to Drupal and flat file alternatives like Grav, Bludit and Kirby to name a few. I like static sites for the obvious reason that there’s no database to monkey with on the backend and thus less attack vectors to go around. Publii reminds me of your vanilla Html web page program like Frontpage / Expression Web. Nowhere as deep and complicated as Dreamweaver thats for certain. And not even as complicated at Frontpage either. Im looking forward to seeing what will be added.

September 5, 2021 at 5:27 pm #6293

[anonymous]

As a followup to my earlier comment. Am I to understand that Publii does not publish “changes” but everything each and every time you add or alter something? If thats the case then it’s really just a slick desktop web publishing tool but I fail to see how that makes it a CMS. Can anyone else but the one user collaborate on it?

September 6, 2021 at 1:26 pm #6296

[anonymous]

I will say that Publii clearly is a CMS system since it has the typical structure, as described here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_management_system. Okay, it maybe does not have everything that is mentioned as a core feature. If Dreamweaver is a CMS, I don’t know.

How exactly the publishing works, I either don’t know. But if I do only make a small change in a post, it regenerates fast. If I add a new post it has to work some more. Deleting the site and republishing make it use a longer time. So my conclusion is that it does not publish everything each and every time. Remember that if you have a list of the last ten post on every page, then the CMS has to update that list each time you make a new post and that will say that it has to republish/update all the pages. So small changes can make a big publishing event regardless of which CMS system you are using.

September 6, 2021 at 6:49 pm #6298

[anonymous]

I understand where you’re coming from but I’m still left with the feeling that something is either being left out or ignored when it comes to describing this product. Frontpage would publish “changes” without necessarily uploading the entire site. Does Publii do the same thing? I see no mention that it does. A static site generator, like Hugo, fast as it is in the generation process rebuilds everything. That in my mind is ridiculous! A hosted flat file system or even the MySQL backed WordPress would naturally allow changes on the fly without uploading everything because, there again… its all out there on the server. I already use Rocket Cake for simple web site publishing because its brain damaged simple and quick at what it does. But it too is just a static old school prog. Im just amazed that there isn’t a system after all of these years that can emulate a Frontpage manner of publishing. Maybe I’m missing something

September 6, 2021 at 11:10 pm #6302

[anonymous]

Publii indeed only uploads the modified files – this is mentioned in the docs. I’m not sure about the rebuilding it does locally. Either way I don’t see this as an issue unless one is making new posts every 5 minutes.

September 7, 2021 at 2:15 am #6305
[anonymous]
[anonymous] wrote:

Can anyone else but the one user collaborate on it?

The devs have shared some workaround for managing a Publii site on multiple computers. Hopefully, these help!
- https://getpublii.com/blog/managing-static-website-on-multiple-computers.html
- https://getpublii.com/docs/publii-on-multiple-computers-via-dropbox.html