Universal tool for website building, theme building and plugin building

LinuC

Hi Marc

I wrote down this idea today and sent it to three people, hoping that the idea will somehow lead to better coordinating the website builder scene. It would be great if the three people would make the idea a reality.

Universal tool for website building, theme building and plugin building, with import/export functions for other website builders

Patrick Reto Bieri, Buenos Aires June 26, 2022

Dear software developers

I wrote down this idea because I would like to contribute something to ensure that the website building scene gets a strong tool that gives the user all the possibilities in one. So far I have not found anything on the Internet that corresponds to my idea.

To realize this project, you need knowledge in CMS, plugin building and static website generation. Therefore, I have informed the following three people:

Stephane from faboba, a very experienced software developer for various CMS.
[https://www.faboba.com]

Marc Anton Dahmen from Automad, a CMS developer.
[https://automad.org/]

Ole Vik from Grav, he has developed a plugin for static websites.
[https://olevik.me/]

What should it be?

A tool (CMS) with which a user without programming knowledge can create a website, including a theme builder and plugin builder, if possible drag and drop.

Additional:

The tool is able to generate a static website, with full functionality.

It can import plugins and themes from other website builders and use them via an interface without the plugins and themes being adapted to the tool (black box method).

It can export its own themes, plugins or entire websites, automatically adapted for other website builders.

It can integrate plugin functionality directly into themes and thus make the theme a hybrid between a theme and a plugin. This result can also be exported for other website builders.

It is multi-language capable, as a tool and also for the created themes, plugins and websites.

What are the advantages?

High portability, high compatibility, high usability.

The tool requires little own plugins and themes, as these can be imported from other website builders.

It serves a multiple purpose, flat-file CMS (possibly also as an option with a database), theme builder and plugin builder.

It can be easily installed, either locally or on a server and serves as a central development platform, also for other website builders.

It ends the fixation of a website project on a specific website builder and really gives the user the free choice. The user also gets the easy option to move his website from one website builder to another via the tool.

What could be used?

I have found a few additional projects that might be helpful.

Theme builder grapesjs, drag and drop
[https://grapesjs.com/demo.html]

Theme builder UIkit
[https://getuikit.com/]

Theme builder Foundation
[https://get.foundation]

Nikola, Static Site Generator
[https://getnikola.com/]

Pelican, Static Site Generator
[https://blog.getpelican.com/]

QGIS Plugin Builder
[https://g-sherman.github.io/Qgis-Plugin-Builder/]

What is my hope?

It would be great if this idea were realized one day and if other website builder teams would open up more for a constructive cooperation. Everything is open-source, but due to the many different methods and strategies of tool development, the choice once made remains practically mandatory for the user. With this idea, a quasi standardization could succeed and users could move their websites more easily without having to start from scratch again.

Thank you very much for your reading time and for taking note!

greetings
Patrick Reto Bieri
[http://linuc.hstn.me] (made with WP and falang, now as a not quite functional static website)

mad

LinuC Hi Patrick,

for sure this is a great idea and I am happy that you have reached out! From a technical perspective, such a standard is not only challenging but also almost impossible. A powerful CMS consists of so many elements that also have a large amount of dependencies. In order to achieve a common content, theme and plugin standard, all those elements have to be aligned and unified. That would not only lead to one single end product that would have a monopoly and would essentially stop any further progress due to a lack of alternatives, but also contain a lot of bloat. Different websites have different needs and therefore require a different set of tools that do the job in the most efficient way — because they are specialized.

For example a simple blog CMS that is made to be fast and minimal and only consists of Markdown files would require to implement an entire page builder in order to be compatible.

Another example is the content transfer between a CMS with a database and a flat-file one. Relational databases work so much different from flat-file systems that there is just no easy and reasonable way to make that compatible.

Aside from the technical issues, creating a world wide standard involves a great amount of administration and communication that basically slows down everything so much that new features won’t be shipped anymore since the effort would just be to much.

However, from a user’s perspective I can totally understand your idea and I can see the benefits as well and therefore I’m enjoying such a discussion.

So thank you very much for sharing this!

LinuC

mad

Hi Marc

I understand your arguments very well. That's why my idea is that there is a central CMS that has these capabilities, in addition to the usual ones. It would then serve as a hub. With the import function, which does not change the imported element, but addresses it via an interface, the imported element remains functional in the original CMS. The export functions actually only do what various plugins already do, for example, moving a website from WP to Grav. The standardization is therefore just quasi and can be handled by the central CMS alone. And because it has a theme builder and a plugin builder built in, you can make the results usable for other CMS with the exprotfunctions. This would be much easier than if every CMS has such plugins and usually not just one! But for sure it is a longer way and requires some effort.

I continue to hope and I see that something needs to be done, including in terms of server load. Static websites wherever possible, comments are not required, interaction can be limited to a flat file forum, as in the case of linuc website. For bloggers, there are fb or mewe and many other "social sites". And finally, you can post a link to the fb or to twitter. Or the web hosts will eventually break down under the financial burden, resp. there will only be some, very large ones, such as ifastnet, with countless resellers.

I hope your project will continue to succeed well! I haven't tested automad yet, but I've already read a lot in the documentation. One question: Is the built-in theme builder drag and drop? Or is it code oriented? I'm a helpless case in coding...

LinuC

I just copied this from Grav forum, then I will shut up. Maybe it helps to understand, what the CMS world has to build up next?

Companies are increasingly using several CMS. Usually one of them is the central CMS (for example, WP). In addition, another CMS is used to solve special things more easily than would be possible with WP. For example, this could be to build a very fast website, using either flatfile CMS or static website builder. The reasons for this are simple, it’s about the money and the amount of work (which is ultimately the same thing).

So there is obviously a need to combine the functionality of different CMS. The following articles are about a pachwork of several CMS, but each CMS works independently for itself. Of course, it is clear that a company also needs more knowledge and more specialists for this, which in turn causes costs. Therefore, the logical next step will be to demand a real MULTI-CMS, which can offer the functionality of different CMS in one go. If a CMS has the options to work as a flat file or as a database CMS and also as a static website builder, then that would be a big advantage. And if the CMS can also use themes / plugins from other CMS, which are docked as “modules” and operated via an interface function (without changing the original module), then that’s even better! The big advantage of such a MULTI-CMS with integrated theme builder and plugin builder is that the content has only to be created once. I create a page or an article in the MULTI-CMS and choose the way I want to publish it, i.e. as a webpage in my database CMS, or as a webpage in my flat file CMS, or as a static webpage, or all three together. Of course, all this is done by the MULTI-CMS, since it contains all three functionalities.

I hope you now understand a little better what I’m talking about and why this also has to do with the host servers and their capacity, because it’s always about money, at least almost always. And companies want to make money, not lose, or they can no longer pay the wages of employees and you become unemployed.

[https://www.forrester.com/blogs/why-a-multi-cms-approach-may-be-right-for-your-brand/]

[https://torquemag.io/2017/12/multiple-cms-wordpress/]

One should try to always be one step ahead of the customer’s wishes and to develop a MULTI-CMS already now, because it will not be easy!

Post with image:

[https://discourse.getgrav.org/t/how-can-i-integrate-the-functionality-of-a-plugin-into-my-theme/21015/8]

Everyone

This is impossible to do. For the same reasons you have multiple car types - some faster, some with more space, some with larger capacity. By the way, the forrester article is a garbage written mainly to boost SEO ranks.

mad

Everyone I really agree with you here! I think that this would also kill any diversity and therefore smaller projects would become obsolete. That in return would slow down progress due to the lack of concurrency. Nobody would win.