I’m making this request on behalf of a community I’m part of, which has some fairly specific requirements that we’re struggling to fill. Basically, we’re an art and writing group that makes extensive use of building our own old-school webpages (almost exclusively HTML, some of us use some CSS as well). This group has been running for over 25 years (late 90s), and back in the old days our website building needs were met by Frontpage, Dreamweaver, and the like. Most of these are gone now, obviously, and we’ve had trouble finding a more modern equivalent that does what we want.
We have experimented with CMS options, but had various issues arising from this - lack of customisation/design flexibility (each individual page we create often has a completely unique design based on the content, whereas most CMS is focused on creating a cohesive design template for a whole site), security problems (especially WordPress), being locked into that CMS and unable to export to a different one or plain HTML, etc.
What we need:
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WYSIWYG interface - although most of us know basic HTML and some CSS, we’re not coders and primarily work visually. We are not aiming for professional-looking websites to sell products, and there are no databases or scripts to worry about. The ability to be able to pick colours, layouts, etc, and then write text and add images is what we’re after.
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Downloadable - we need actual software that we can run locally on our own computers. We all have our own webhosting with FTP access, so we just want to be able to create the HTML files and not be tied into a particular host or platform. If there’s a web-based option that will allow us to simply create a page and then download the final result as a usable HTML file that we can upload to our own hosting, then that option will be considered.
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Easy to set up - tech knowledge varies in the group, so something with an easy installation is needed. I found a couple of options that exist only as Github repositories, and the explanations of how to get them working went right over our heads.
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Free - we’re all poor, starving artists. That said, we’d consider a paid-for option if it was low cost (<£15/$20 per licence), but we’re not in a position to drop £100 each on software.
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Will consider CMS options if it allows each page to be individually and uniquely designed, and does not lock you into using only that CMS - easy export to plain HTML/CSS would be a requirement. With a 25-year old community that has outlived a number of platforms and hosts, we’re wary of anything that tries to lock us into a specific platform. The CMS would nevertheless need to be relatively easy to install on webhosting, due to the aforementioned varying degrees of tech knowledge. Knowledge of Javascript, PHP, etc is extremely limited.
In summary, we’re maintaining a hobby community started in the late 90s when we were teenagers, and we’re looking for FOSS options that replace the Frontpage and Dreamweaver type software we used back then.
Thanks! :)
Ugh, I thought there’d be more but when I look up FLOSS alternatives to Dreamweaver most are discontinued or misses the mark. At a glance at the ones remaining, maybe Silex comes closest?
It looks like that has a bunch of git and jamstack features that go beyond making simple, individual HTML pages but hopefully Silex is still “dumb” enough to also make those.
These days it seems you need a static site generator just to make very basic sites, and I’m also looking for a simple and easy way to chuck quick things online without some advanced framework to compile pages. I’m still eyeing PicoCMS as a very basic PHP engine that will simply parse a bunch of Markdown files into a website and update it when a new file is uploaded… I think it’s possible to write individual CSS for pages in that.
Otherwise, maybe your collective needs to consider something like neocities or even your own tilde site 🙂
It’s kind of bleak. The web was supposed to be for everybody. I hadn’t realized that in the last two decades we had lost the ability for neophytes to chug out HTML pages from desktop in a visual manner and upload them to a server for the world to see. Only non dead software I found that came close was Pinegrow, but it’s proprietary.
Oh, it’s bleak on so many levels. Consider how few who own their web presence anymore, even small to medium companies like my local pizzaria are only on social media.
And it’s not that everything needs to be basic HTML and CSS imo. I honestly think blogs were great, and Wordpress too for at least its first few major versions. It should just be so much more accessible to make and host your own site than it is to ignore Meta’s terms and conditions and sign up for f——ng Facebook.
Yep, it’s really disappointing that most of the options listed as alternatives to Dreamweaver and Frontpage are either discontinued, or lack a visual interface, or are web-based and attached to a specific hosting provider. We’ve actually been looking for the right software for over three years now. Some of the discontinued ones are still accessible and mostly working, but they have bugs that are obviously never going to be fixed.
We do have one or two people using Neocities, as that’s what replaced Geocities - but there’s an understandable reluctance to use free hosting services. We lost quite a lot of content when Geocities was shut down, only some of which we were able to reconstruct. So the majority of us have our own webhosting now - for what we need, the cheapest packages are more than sufficient. It’s kind of depressing how that actually makes it harder - Neocities, Wix, and a bunch of other free hosting options provide page builders, but only if you’re using their hosting. When you have your own hosting, your webhost pushes you to install WordPress and considers their job done at that point.
But thanks for the suggestion of Silex. It’s one I hadn’t encountered in my previous searches, but it looks like it might do what we need. The desktop app and visual interface look promising, so I’m going to play around with it and see if it’ll do what we need. I think PicoCMS is worth investigating further as well - I can install it on a subdomain and poke at it a bit. I’m liking that it’s lightweight and stores everything as text files.
Thank you! :)