I understand most people's enthusiasm with static site generators. But either they are only building sites for themselves or their clients are very different than mines. How do your clients edit the site? How do they do simple things like cropping images for example? And what about forms, newsletter subscribe forms or contact forms? Do you use a third party service for everything? I can't see how that is simpler or more reliable.
The assumption that Wordpress means a client can edit their own site has been very wrong, for many users. Unless the site is built in Microsoft Word (and I've seen that done..) they are going to be using a professional for edits, and hence I refer back to static builders.
That's why we are developing Strattic, which is a static publishing sites for the popular CMSs like WordPress. This way end-users who aren't techy can continue to manage their sites in our secure staging area, and the site is then published live as static. Our company site is running on our platform - the origin site is WordPress: https://strattic.com. I'd love to hear feedback, and we're also looking for beta testers.
We're solving the CMS issue for our users. Just import your Jekyll/Hugo repo. Forestry will automatically generate an index.html file (it's a CMS in a React.js file) and deploys it to your static site. Now, non-technical users can log into your static site at site.com/admin/ and see a powerful CMS.
While it's obviously not the best solution, and not something that everyone would want to do, I started creating an application just so that other people could edit a static site. It gives them a basic editor, abstracts away frontmatter, and can generate the new site from updated content.
I definitely have some regrets from this approach instead of just picking a CMS that already exists, and if I were in a similar situation in the future I'd probably start comparing preexisting CMS options.
The solution here is to use a cloud based CMS (we use Contentful ourselves) and then just import the content during the build process of the static site. The client gets the CMS, you control the site. Best of both worlds.
