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andrejewski / smithsonian

web interface for Metalsmith
ISC License
36 stars 1 forks source link

You need another label on your issues #1

Closed danjessen closed 10 years ago

danjessen commented 10 years ago

You need a appreciation label, because I just wanted to say :+1: This makes me think of Kirby CMS and I really like that. So thumbs up.

It would be really cool if we could make Smithsonian a lightweight Node crossbreed between Kirby and Harp.js. Even with my limited Node skills I would actually be willing to help with that ;)

andrejewski commented 10 years ago

Why, thank you. I built Smithsonian because I wanted a simple way for one of my clients to manage the files of their new blog which was going to be hosted on a remote server. Wordpress was too huge, Jekyll too scary for them. Metalsmith was a new JavaScript project and I thought why not make it more human-friendly.

However, having used Smithsonian/Metalsmith I could not imagine this project ever competing with Kirby. I had not seen Harp, but looking the documentation over I don't see Smithsonian in that league either. Metalsmith is the wrong software for a blog and, as Smithsonian is an extension of Metalsmith, Smithsonian is even worse.

There are use cases for Smithsonian as a file directory explorer, assuming you ignore Metalsmith configuration. But other than that, Smithsonian's success will lie in Metalsmith's ability to find a realistic niche.

danjessen commented 10 years ago

There is also is also Statamic which has a even cooler Dashboard then kirby. The thing is though they are both PHP. And what I just wan't something lightweight. But maybe it should be on top of Harp instead. Metalsmith just seams so easy and versitile though.

andrejewski commented 10 years ago

There are two things that make Metalsmith, in my opinion, unfit for blog software: the one-to-one file transform strategy and the fact that Metalsmith is so flexible. Blogs are not one-to-one file relationships, the most basic proof being an article index. This would make standards very tedious and unintuitive for anyone to implement. Metalsmith's flexibility comes from its plugin system, which as a community has not been inclined to standardize on how the data and metadata should be formatted. This early indecision is going to lead to projects, if worthwhile, breaking later on. Any good blog CMS should not be built on shifting sand.

danjessen commented 10 years ago

As a note, I came across: Techy