Why did we develop yet a another CMS / Blogging system - OpenSource

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Static site generators are awesome, unfortunately non-technical people have hard time getting on-board. One of the reason, is that when they hear about “GIT”, installing OpenSSH Putty, etc… they run away :slight_smile:

In short, It does require quite a bit of knowledge to start building website using SSG’s… Potentially if they want to be using some CMS they might require to install NodeJs / Python or other utilities.

Once that is done, they also have to start thinking how / where they would be hosting their website and also creating all of the other. In short, these people ends-up with using system like WIX and paying lots of money. We wanted to build something to help end-user get started with Hugo but automating the process as a whole including the git creation of their website based on a template (from our hosted CMS version).

Our solution was built using the following in mind:

  • Single crossplatform binary CMS (GoHugo / API)
  • quick and easy to setup on cheap run of themill webhostings
  • an easy to use but powerful backend, which enables our (mostly) tech-unsavy customers to change every text, every image, create new pages etc.
  • Git backed, static site generators
  • No 3rd party tools such as Git client / OpenSSH when working locally, but still allow them to save changes to git (for non-technical people)
  • Easy hosted / preview sites using git hooks update the websites including preview websites for (PR & Branches)

I would like to hear about what you guys are thinking of our implementation, and hopefully if any Vue.JS folks, or anyone out there would be interested into helping us growing a community around this CMS please reach out to us via our homepage at acentera.com

So our CMS “Org” website is located at : https://acenteracms.org/

For people that would simply want to test our online “beta” version, you could try to create a new account at https://cms.acentera.com/admin/ and let us know if you ran into any issues, or what you liked / disliked on creating a new SSG website and the overall experience.

Kind Regards,

  • Francis L.
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I think it’s cool to lower the threshold for people using Hugo. :slight_smile: So compliments for doing that.

I think you’re missing the required notices from Hugo’s Apache License 2.0. At least I understand from your website that you use’s Hugo code base. But I couldn’t find those notices on your website.

I thought people need to include the license with the software, state any significant changes you made, and include a notice file with attributions.

Perhaps it’s in the download file, but for Windows that gives me a bin file (?) so I couldn’t look into that. (But I could of course misunderstood the license.)

I don’t feel comfortable enough with your startup website to give you my email address and other personal data. Why not post some screenshots of the admin area on the website? :slight_smile:

You otherwise have a big ask for us, and I doubt many people have the time and energy to create an account and learn your CMS from scratch (there’s neither a docs section, it seems).

If your business case is to provide Hugo’s features to people without knowledge/experience in tech, wouldn’t it make sense to make the landing page reflect that?

If I were you, I would:

  • Not mention the technologies above the middle of the page. Just put them in the bottom or in the footer. Because throwing the names of technologies around that people don’t know might make it seem like your product is more complicated than it is.
  • ‘serverless’ and ‘HUGO static site generator’ are probably not terms that your WIX-like customers know what they are. You might even need to explain what static sites are, and how they’re better than a WIX-based site.
  • A ‘gohugo implementation’ probably also has no meaning for someone that doesn’t know Hugo, especially since you exchange the term ‘HUGO’ with ‘gohugo’. I doubt people unfamiliar with Hugo know that both terms refer to the same thing.

A more concrete example is from your ‘Welcome’ blog post. There it says:

Let’s take the viewpoint of someone who isn’t technical and new to static sites:

  • What is a Go Binary?
  • Where do I download Go binaries?
  • What does ‘drop inside ZIPed content’?
  • What is ZIPed by the way?
  • How do I launched ‘dropped zipped content’?
  • Where do I type in commands?

And so on.

I would add a terms of service, privacy policy, contact page, docs section, about us page for the overall experience. You guys are a commercial company, so those things should be taken care of. With GDPR this is even mandatory.

Actually, you might even want to put the ACenterA CMS project on hold and at least make sure that your main website is GDPR-compliant. There’s less than two weeks to do that, and your ToS hasn’t been updated in 4 years. If I skim over it and see how you handle data deletion requests, I don’t think that’s GDPR-compliant. Especially when you’re hosting websites (and thus sitting on databases of customer information) you definitely need to make sure this is up to par.

My overall experience has also been negative with the number of typo’s and formatting mistakes. It feels a bit rushed, to put it mildly. So this isn’t something I’d be willing to use for my commercial sites.

(Sorry for the salty response, but I really do mean well. :slight_smile: Just see it as feedback from someone who isn’t your superfan or friend. :slight_smile: )

1 Like
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The .com and .org sites don’t even load for me…

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Good comments and thank you for that.

The actual admin interface is identical to the one in the video on the website (except few minor sections ie: the git creation process). But, indeed more screenshots / tutorials / videos on how to get started is required.

Indeed, currently the goal was mostly to get it out available / to get the project discovered by some other GoHugo and get some feedback.

No worries and thank you for the long list of comments :slight_smile:

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Corrected, thanks. I thought i had fixed that ‘no-content’ ‘bug’… i guess it wasn’t.

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I saw the video. It works through a Git repository like other CMS solutions.

But what is the purpose of the crossplatform binary that you offer as a download on your site?

I tested it.

It requires to be executed at the root of a Hugo project and all it does is the equivalent of the hugo command.

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Yes, it is mainly 100% the same Hugo library but with few other tweakings. Added a new /api which allows to perform GIT commit on behalf’s of the user without any GIT client requirements. It also allow to update the config file using The JSON API… or add / update content.

The new API port also allow to open an Admin UI. Now that being said, it is mostly compatible with only one of our theme, in order to be able to edit the the text. Currently the HTML require a bit of extra HTML markup… we want to change this and allow an JavaScript file for each sections or a configuration file that would display a different UI per sections type of thing.

It was mostly a proof of concept to buid an API on top of the Hugo.

Unlike other CMS you only need be Hugo binary and you are good to go. No nodejs etc…

Plus it also have a multi-tenant capability on our hosting solutions which we plan to make open source once we tested and ran it for a while and proven it works. In short the same API allow to access a different site if passed proper access tokens/cookies but on the local that is not really needed.

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As a note on the API we also wanted to build an HugoFiddle type of thing, to allow the community build and exchange Implementations how-to.

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Ah I never saw the video (script and ad blocker). Looks good that video! :slight_smile:

Hope this project works out for you. Have a nice weekend. :slight_smile:

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Hmm. None of these are necessary to use Hugo though are they? You only need the Hugo binary and an FTP app to upload your site to a webhotel. And many basic webhotels come with an online filemanager thing, so you can probably do without the FTP-app too.

IME Hugo on its own is already much easier to understand and use than even a hosted Wordpress.com site. But maybe that’s just me … :wink:

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I never heard of the term ‘webhotels’ before, but I definitely like it. :slight_smile:

But you’re right Bluefuzz. Hugo works fine without Putty, PuttyGen, OpenSSH, Git. Actually, people who know a bit about WordPress also know about FTP (to upload/install their WordPress and custom code), so there’s nothing new for them there when they switch to Hugo.

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Really? It’s always been the common term for your basic cheap ‘n’ cheerful shared webhosting around here (Denmark) …

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Indeed, still all the git automation creation / integration / preview site is something that our solution offer and way simpler than an FTP upload and GIT ensure they do not lose the code of their “hugo content/layouts/etc…” so an Git repository is quite interesting. (And hopefully we can make this opensource over the next year, for people that would prefer to host it on their own)

I have read in some post that sometimes some users had issue with their website that would not be showing properly when deployed vi FTP, and asking for help. Having the preview site 100% compatible including a “secret code” to view the result (or share) before going live can be quite interesting.

But yes, someone simply using hugo doesn’t need GIT and maybe knows how to FTP to their site. I don’t agree that hugo is “that easy” though, I mean, there are a lots of documentation to go through in order to be able to create a new page content and even make it multilang etc… and it does require quite a bit of development skills.

One thing that we do with our during “creation process” is that we initiate the Git repository for the end-user with the selected theme that they choose (we only have one theme at the moment that we support). So as long as a user have created a bitbucket account (can use github, but bitbucket have private repos).

I believe we provided one of the the easiest way to get started with Hugo if you have zero developers experience.

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Example of a Preview Site:

https://0e490500519a11e8996f256b97b073c1.preview.acentera.com/

Code: 1171

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Hi @FrancicsL

the preview link is not working at all for me

have you abandoned this project?