Hands on with Publii, a Free Static CMS Generating HTML Sites

Building a website used to be easy.

You’d code some HTML, throw in a little CSS, spice it up with JS, and voilà!

You’d then push these static files to any server, and BAM, a live site would appear.

Today, you can easily get lost in tooling to build “modern” sites: JS frameworks, task runners, module bundlers, package managers, testing frameworks, linting, pre-processors…

But it doesn’t ALWAYS have to be that way:

Some web projects are really simple, and so should their tooling be

At Snipcart, for instance, we receive lots of requests for adding e-commerce to static sites.

While our Jekyll, Hugo, Gatsby, and 11ty tutorials help developers, another, recurring request often pops up later on:

How can I add a CMS to my static site?

Recently, I asked that question myself.

See, I had this project: build a website to show how disappointed I was with Apple (long story).

My goal? Create a static HTML site I could manage with a CMS, with as little coding and $ as possible. And do all of that in a single weekend—tops.

(The tutorial section further down shows you exactly how I did this. Step. By. Step.)

First, I looked at the static CMS space a bit.

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