Having to mess directly with HTML is too risky. Maybe it could work if it had a really easy to use version control, but I've never seen that either.
Wordpress.com is expensive if you want "advanced" features like editing the CSS(!). As for Blogger, I don't want to tie them to a proprietary solution.
Thanks for the suggestions, but it requires them to edit Markdown, which is a no-go. I need a GUI. Is there an Hugo or Jekyll frontend that provides a GUI and supports those tags? I couldn't find one.
You want a WYSIWYG editor which understands videos on the one side and a light blog posting engine on the other. I think something like this is not existing. Choose your devil: Go WordPress, go to a free service (like blogger) and put a custom domain in front, or accept that markdown can be used. A full featured blog editor which produces light static output is like a hybrid... it sounds to be heavy on the editor and transform part and light on the output... I think nobody is really targeting that on OSS.
Update: Maybe take a closer look to OctoberCMS. It seems to go into your direction.
It does exists, it's called Movable Type, it's just expensive :)
Thanks for the suggestion, but it doesn't seem like it generates static pages...? I'm keen on that because I really don't want to have to babysit the server and apply security fixes (I trust nginx to auto-update without breaking the site).
Wordpress.com is expensive if you want "advanced" features like editing the CSS(!). As for Blogger, I don't want to tie them to a proprietary solution.