I’m starting a NonProfit Fediverse powered business called BT Free. I was thinking of making my homepage built on Ghost, but due to some of it’s choices, I’m looking for something else.
Does anyone have any suggestions for a self hosted, possibly fediverse powered, software for creating a simple clean efficient business website landing page that explains who we are, what we’re doing, etc. I am NOT a designer so something with templates or can hold my hand would be wildly helpful.
I was thinking maybe a static site generator maybe?
Anyone have ANY thoughts or suggestions? Remember there are no such things as bad ideas or comments!
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My favorite static site generator by far is Eleventy, which you can learn by reading their sample code at eleventy-base-blog. It uses NodeJS which runs on all major platforms, and it generates plain old HTML that you can put on any static host. I played with several of the generators on the Jamstack list, and decided that this is the one I’m most comfortable recommending. It has a very high power-to-effort ratio, you can do some really useful stuff with very little knowledge. I’m using it on my personal site, https://nycki.net/, to automatically generate a “navbar” on every page, plus an RSS feed for my blog. It’s also nice for generating “prev/next” links under articles.
Thank you! I shall look into that!
I really like Generatepress on WordPress and their default themes
Oh another interesting one! I shall check into that! Thank you! :-D
If you’re okay with writing a little HTML and just don’t want to deal with writing/designing the CSS, I recently found out about HTML5 UP, which has a bunch of Creative Commons Attribution 3.0-licensed templates. It’s fairly straightforward to modify the content if you understand the HTML, and then you can host it for free as a static page at any number of places like GitHub Pages or Cloudflare Pages.
If you don’t want to have the CC-By attribution on the webpage, the designer also offers a service called Pixelarity with the same templates and more for a $19/quarter non-renewing subscription. You can continue using the templates even after the subscription expires and can keep making new sites with any template you already downloaded, you just don’t get any updates or tech support when the subscription expires. Upload to one of those free static hosts and it’s dramatically cheaper than Ghost or WordPress, and probably less work than a static site generator for something that’s not changing often.
This sounds massively interesting! Thank you so much for the recommendation! I’ll look into this! Thank you!
Have used Jekyll, Hugo, and Docusaurus to generate static sites, and Wordpress and Ghost for blogs.
A few things to think about:
- Where do you plan to host and how much is the monthly budget?
- How much traffic do you expect to get?
- Will the content be static or updated often (i.e. landing page site vs. blog).
- Will more than one person be updating the site?
- How technical is the person/people updating the site? Are they OK with using terminal and command-lines, or GUI and point and click.
- Will there be ‘member-only’ features, i.e. things that require users creating an account and logging in?
- Will you need to offer a way for people to get in touch? Like, contact pages, email, etc.
- Will there be a need for public to post and answer questions (i.e. a forum).
- Will you need future support for things like newsletters, shopping carts, etc.
If one-person, technical, static, I’d go with Jekyll and Github pages, or Jekyll/Hugo/Docusaurus on Cloudflare pages. They all have templates. But you need to know how to setup github repos and tools. Cost is $0 to operate, other than annual fee for custom DNS domain name.
If more than one person, non-technical, or dynamic, then hosted Wordpress or Ghost. Budget for DNS name and ~20-50 dollars or euros/month (plus or minus, depending on features and traffic). There are free versions of these, but they slap ads all over them.
You can self-host all these, but it’s much easier to have someone else deal with traffic spikes.
If you need community forums or a way for users to communicate with each other, then none of the above.
This is excellently well thought out post and some GREAT questions! I’ll have to go through this more. I’m definitely planning on Self Hosting via Hetzner, I expect it to be static. I don’t honestly expect much traffic, but who the hell knows. :-D I don’t think I’ll need forums as I have the Fediverse! :-D
I’ve been experimenting with Hugo to make simple websites. It’s got a very minor learning curve, and plenty of templates to get you started. I like it!
You’re referring to https://gohugo.io/ the static site generator?
You got it! I should have included the link, sorry!
No worries in the least! :-) I just want to make sure I’m on the same page as you! :-D Thank you for the info!
look into static site generators
Yup, heard of them, used them very briefly. I think it’s time to give it a try again! :-D Thank you!
Wordpress fits this bill.
Although their CEO has a few screws loose.
Yeah, I’ve heard folks use Wordpress and it has a Fediverse Plugin now. And it can be selfhosted? I’ll check it out! Thank you! :-)
The other catch with WP is that there’s a lot of overhead, and you have to keep it updated to avoid security issues. Static site generators have minimal overhead and updates, but may not be as easy to use when building the site.
what was your show-stopper when you evaluated Ghost?
I’m not doing a publishing platform really. And I can’t seem to get email going. I’ve tried with MailerSend and while I know I can send email, through swaks, Ghost just won’t. Someone told me it only uses MailGun, which I attempted to set up and after 2 days the DNS verification didn’t go through, even though I konw for a fact it was there. And at this point I really don’t want lock in to a specific service if that’s true.
Ghost is meant more for hosting blogs and newsletters, not necessarily an interactive site.
Lots of static site frameworks out there: Hugo, Gatsby, Jekyll - all with their own strengths and weaknesses. Hugo probably has the largest following and template ecosystem, so may be faster to get started. Something a bit different that has some steam behind it is Grav CMS.
I think you want a static site generator
We use Vitepress for https://fedecan.ca/en/
https://vitepress.dev/guide/getting-started
If you want to selfhost it, there is https://www.coolify.io/ , but imo you want something like GitHub pages/ Netlify since it’s for your business
What kind of fediverse features did you want for the website? You might be better off making accounts on fediverse platforms and linking to the website
I’ve heard of Hugo, I’ll check into this one!
Jekyll is also really nice. I’ve used it several times with great success
@otter @ozoned @selfhosted you can also look into https://kitten.small-web.org/ made by our very own and lovely @aral
Aral and I have spoken before! Aral used to stream on Owncast where I first met him, do you still do those streams Aral? :-)
Do you think Kitten would be a good use case for BT Free dot org?
I’m currently looking into Ghost. What choices turned you off of it.
If you end up not liking WP, Drupal is another option. https://new.drupal.org/home. // https://www.drupal.org/project/activitypub
If you are going to evaluate Drupal in 2025, I STRONGLY encourage you to start with the Drupal CMS install. There are so many optional modules with Drupal, it can be overwhelming.
If you are already familiar with Docker, you can spin up a Drupal CMS instance using DDEV. You’ll have no problem Googling that.
If you aren’t familiar with Docker and want to try it, https://new.drupal.org/drupal-cms/launcher is a ridiculously easy way to start on most operating systems. That approach gets a little trickier when you want to move the site/cms application instance to a host. There is documentation, but I would look it over before getting too far into this approach.
My recommendation for spinning up a Drupal CMS instance is on a free sandbox on https://docs.pantheon.io/drupal-cms. Acquia offers a free trial in exchange for the information they need to target you with marketing, but it is only a 4 hour trial. Pantheon lets you keep your sandbox as long as you account remains active.
Unfortunately ActivityPub isn’t included in any of the Drupal CMS Recipes (yet), so you have to add it with
composer require 'drupal/activitypub:^1.0@alpha'.Composer is npm for PHP. If you are familiar npm, apt-get, homebrrw, pip, gem, etc, you’ll have no problem understanding Composer.
I don’t know anything about Drupal. I shall look at it. Right now to get up and running I’m thinking of just running a SSG like Pelican. Especially since the Dev is on the Fediverse. :-D
I know a silly reason to pick it, but I’m a Fedi Lover lol. :-)
Thank you for the info though. I’ll definitely look more into it. And thank you so much for the very deeply detailed response! :-)
I shall check into it! Thank you! :-)
HTMLy is nice.
That looks really nice! Thank you for the recommendation. Still trying to figure out what to use. :-)
@[email protected] static site generators are on the tougher side to use. They usually come with the ability to grab an off the shelf theme, but then you kind of have to learn how the theme works specifically in order to customize it. I’ve been on the hunt for a similar product and haven’t had much luck either.
I love business
I don’t LOVE business personally lol :-D but I do love the Fediverse and I’m going to attempt to “business” it at least. :-D NonProfit, because we’ve been down the route of Profit before and we saw where that got us.
I love Steam
That’s fair. I love Valve’s Steam as well. :-)
