I want a WordPress-like UI for editing Jekyll static web sites, with push-button deployment to FTP/SFTP/S3/Git/Dat/IPFS etc. I'd like this UI to be a desktop and/or mobile app rather than a hosted web site so it's entirely under the user's control.
Make it easy for anybody to use the many cheap static-file hosting options that are out there and I think we'd see that overtake WordPress for a lot of uses. Bonus: no server-side vulnerabilities to worry about and easy use of CDNs.
It looks like a significant part of what I want is https://github.com/jekyll/jekyll-admin which provides a nice locally-hosted web interface for editing a Jekyll site. The major missing pieces are (1) push-button deployment, for which the jekyll-admin developers are looking for contributions (https://github.com/jekyll/jekyll-admin/issues/75), and then (2) nice packaging to make it easy to run on various operating systems.
@jamey My preferred setup for something like this is to just have git running on the deployment server and use a hook there to deploy updates on commit to a specified branch. Then deployment just looks like git push origin master. Not quite push button, but pretty close.
@neal That's great for you and it's great for me; I'm using Dokku to do something very similar for myself right now. But I'd like to be able to recommend something for people who only have, say, FTP access to a server, and aren't allowed to run arbitrary code there.
@jamey Yes, that would be nice to have, but at the same time I'm so glad to be off servers like that. FTP updates run a lot slower and it's easy to end up with things being temporarily broken for people visiting mid-update, especially on larger updates or naive update strategies.
@neal For context: I especially want better tools for webcomic creators and serial-story authors and other creative types. Have you seen the kind of garbage hosting that crowd of people tend to use today? A huge fraction is WordPress with a stock theme, but among the rest there are a bunch of people choosing SquareSpace or Wix or Tumblr and fighting their mediocre UIs because it was the first thing they found. If FTP is all they have handy, it's still better than those choices.
