What options do I have for adding content using a mobile device?

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I am pretty new to hugo and static generators in general. Still trying to understand all the pieces at play. In past I have used wordpress a lot and one of the features I really like about wordpress was it’s simple an clean mobile app. You could snap a picture and write a post in a few minutes.
I am planning to start a new blog andcurrently just testing out hugo on google pages, but I can also run it on digital ocean if I have to.

What options do I have for editing my blog content from mobile? Either through a good mobile friendly webapp or a mobile app. Do I need to set up a web server of some sort?

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is a great place to start. They have a very nice site that is responsive and free.

You could also create files directly in git hub but you’d have to add all the front matter and stuff manually. Forestry requires a zip or a github repo to work, and as far as output, they can build your site and transfer it to wherever you host it via ftp. If you use git you have other options.

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Nothing is going to come close to a WordPress mobile app or site. Each time you change something in the Hugo site it will need to build in order to show the changes. In time this will be rad, I am sure, but currently there aren’t solutions where you can snap a pic, add a description and post. :slight_smile:

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It took wordpress many years before the mobile app was available. I think in time we could have a mobile app that is potentially even better than wordpress. As far as I understand, the fact that the site is statically generated does not limit how a UI builder can be used to generate the content. It seems like not many people have been working on providing mobile user interface for static generators in general, but technically it seems very possible.

@gaetawoo thanks for the suggestions, I signed up andtrying forestry.io right now. It is very simple and clean and might just be all I need for now to get by. I think it shows the potential here.

Does anyone know if there is an opensource project similar to forestry.io that tries to bring an intuitive mobile interface to static generators?

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No. There isn’t an Open Source alternative to Forestry.

There is a Cockpit-Next Hugo Add-on that is FOSS (but it doesn’t have live preview) GitHub - iakta/hugocockpit: a Hugo addon for Cockpit-Next CMS, generating Hugo compatible content and running Hugo for you and there is Netlify CMS that is OSS but it runs through Netlify’s service (at least I was never able to run it locally, as the netlify-api seems to be deprecated).

Other than that check out the GUI section of the Docs. And again currently there is nothing for mobile.

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Just some idle chitchat and predictions, nothing serious here…

Well, it took two years after the release of a mainstream smart phone (WordPress for iOS was released in 2009, for Android in 2010). Considering that it was also during the time that mobile bandwidth usage and cost allowed for these kinds of apps, I’d say it was fairly quick. However, given that WordPress itself was 6 years old in 2009, I can see that took a while.

I doubt that.

Not because I don’t think it is possible, just that such a client would change the nature of the build system. At some point Hugo isn’t doing the heavy lifting, or the app itself isn’t that sophisticated.

See what I mean? Unless Hugo gets more pre- and post-processing hooks, a system that is adding content to a repo isn’t Hugo-specific, but it is also dependent on flat files and a build step, so I just don’t see it getting the same features as a database-backed platform, which could be considered a single system.

I haven’t seen anything close to this, and that is an issue for apps interfacing with static sites: there isn’t anything to a static site, so the tools will be built to hook into the infrastructure of the SaaS building the site. So we are going to get apps tied to a paid service.

WordPress basically suffers from a similar predicament, though the work being done on the REST API in core will open up the apps that can be used with any WP instance, and one hopes that others aside from Automattic will produce them, as the desktop apps had been in the past.

Non-scientifically, I think this is because static sites appeal to people that spend time in their $EDITOR all day anyhow. I myself am a “slow web” practitioner, and my phone is not allowed to distract me, so I am certainly not leaping at a mobile editor for static sites. Even the professional work I do in Hugo is for folks that want to change their site maybe once a quarter.

But the power and ease of Hugo and other SSGs will likely attract more diversity in users, concerning use cases and needs. :slight_smile:

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What about trying micropub and quill app?
I’m in the process of trying this.