Exactly. From just scanning the website my impression was Wordpress without a DB dependency. Even though Wordpress is used a lot as a CMS and this might eventually take that route they are clearly pushing blogging.
Apparently the author would agree with you. The front page reads, "Dropplets is not a CMS, it's just for pure blogging and nothing more which is a good thing."
The presentation is awesome. Super clean, I love the logo and the video's that let you know just what this thing is. The blurbs of text were enough to get me interested enough to watch the video. The videos were clean and to the point. Damn, for me this is what all landing pages for projects like this should be. I'm not sure if I'll use your product but I'll certainly bookmark the page to learn from later.
My only recommendation would be to use the new password api going forward and password_compat for versions less than 5.5. I don't see a php version requirement in their docs though.
There isn't any caching. But, everything other than the index page can be generated fairly quickly, because you're not making database calls, only file system calls.
The index page could take a little longer.
Regardless, it's fairly quick, but it generates the output on each request. Which is to be expected, almost every other tool that isn't manually generated is the same.
The code is unfortunately written in straight procedural PHP. It is kind of spaghetti code. The end result is quite pretty, but it ignores all of the best practices in PHP development right now.
Also the last time I tried to set it up, it required that I have a twitter account.
Jekyll requires you to generate your site. Dropplets generates pages on each request.
Jekyll runs on your machine, and is written in Ruby. Dropplets runs on your server, and is written in PHP.
Jekyll's posts require very minimal metadata, and use a key/value pairing system with YAML. Dropplets' posts require a ton of metadata, and the same metadata for every post, and in a specific order, and you can't add arbitrary metadata.
----
I don't think Dropplets has categories, but I may be mistaken.
looks great! definitely will have to try this out.
it's a little discouraging, however, that the issue queue has so many pull requests, comments, etc. without comment.
i love the concept of simplicity and i'm sure the maintainers have a roadmap in mind. it'd be nice if that was communicated a bit so i can know how simple they plan to keep it.
This looks promising. I'm gonna give this a try since I'm looking for a simple and lightweight CMS for my blog. Speaking of which, anyone have any recommendations about that (apart from Jekyll)? I still haven't found what I'm looking for and I'm on the verge of coding my own blog in plain HTML instead of just installing something like Wordpress but that may be a pain in the ass to manage once I have more than handful of posts on my host.
I started playing with Anchor last week. I like it thus far, because it really focuses on blogging, something WordPress kinda deemphasized two years ago.
Plus, it's pretty. Which is always a nice bonus.
----
If you're not averse to paying for something, Statamic looks really awesome.
They both look pretty good, thanks for the suggestions!
As long as its price is reasonable, I don't mind paying for a CMS, but it looks like Anchor fit to my needs better than Statamic. All I want from a CMS is to have its own search and markdown support. That's it. I don't care much about themes and all that. I'm perfectly fine with having white background and black text on top of it centered on the page as a "theme".
Having tried it out before, I found the format used for blog posts to be incredibly arbitrary. It requires your twitter username for every post, and a bunch of other things. Plus, instead of using key/value pairings with yaml or something similar, it required that your headers be in a specific order.
It seems cool, it also seems like a little bit of work could be put into making it more accessible to people who didn't write it.
A small rant: I think it is bad practice to hide content below the page height. I just wanted to close the website because I thought 'nothing to see here' before I accidentally scrolled and more content was revealed.
It has really faint text semi-transparent text on a semi-transparent background which is covered by a Twitter icon, at least in my Chrome with my browser height.
If I zoom out all the way, there's still no indication you can scroll down, because the page "helpfully" hides everything from you.
I read this comment before actually going to the site, which is fortunate, because I'm certain I would've missed the rest of the content if you hadn't pointed that out.
I rarely complain about design issues on websites but this a case where things should really be changed.
The concept and simplicity make me think of Ghost's (http://ghost.org/features/): free, open source, near-minimalist, and self-hosted.
The seemingly only advantage is that Dropplets doesn't require a database, and its landing page is amazingly beautiful, clear, and to the point (though Ghost's "features" page is slick as well).
On a more technical note, click events seem to be propagated up the player on the landing page, closing it when toggling HD for example.
Yep. It's also not self-hosted. Other than the fact that these are both CMS's with modern design on their landing pages, I don't see the correlation. They're very different types of software.
"You can host it on your laptop, or you can host it on a public server. The code is open, and so is the MIT license."
It's currently not public, so I would imagine at the moment it's all hosted on their servers, but according to their blog[0], they're going public on the 14th of October, meaning it should be self-hostable from then, one would assume.
But Ghost uses node.js which almost nobody can actually host themselves, because the hosting that people already pay for doesn't (and perhaps wont) support it. Node may be hip and all, but PHP still seems like the right choice for something as simple as blogging software to me.
Yes, almost nobody. Certainly, everybody CAN get a VPS from Digital Ocean. But should I tell my friends that have never touched a commandline and really struggled with just uploading Wordpress.org (and running the installer) to their shared hosting to start administering a VPS running Linux.
The abysmal HN crowd, no problem. But I bet most people running a WP installation on their shared hosting are not as proficient as you believe.
Stuff like Wordpress and Ghost exist to have a sharecrop of cheap hosting services with it pre-installed — with Ghost it just looks like JS was the language the developer (a front-end dev on Wordpress. . .) was most familiar with, And That's Fine
Amazing. Since the dissolution of Posterous, I've been looking for something simple and easy. And with the theming abilities, it looks like it might just be perfect for me. Can't wait to give it a try today!
Side note: I love how this has been in development since at least February (when the Twitter was launched). Too many half-baked projects get posted to HN the weekend they're launched and then never end up progressing much further. The fact that this has been in the works for a while gives me the confidence to try it, knowing this isn't as fly-by-night as a Show HN weekend project.
"Installing Dropplets can be accomplished in about 30 seconds or under. Just download the latest version, extract "dropplets.zip", then upload the extracted files to your server."
yeah, setting up a dropplets server is simple... step 1: already have a server set up.
who are these "simple" platforms supposed to be for if you already have to have a "server" set up that you can "upload" to? if i can set up a server, why can't i set up a database?
It looks really good, but I hate a lot about the demo theme. Why does anything move without me doing anything? Will the annoying bottom bar always be there? What if I can't find a high-res artsy photo? Was it necessary to knock off Medium's (distinctive) menu icon?
102 comments
[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 374 ms ] threadEDIT: the installation part in the README.md needs some extra info. Like it requires PHP and some file/directory permissions.
The index page could take a little longer.
Regardless, it's fairly quick, but it generates the output on each request. Which is to be expected, almost every other tool that isn't manually generated is the same.
Also the last time I tried to set it up, it required that I have a twitter account.
Also, how about support for category pages? I mean, show a page full of posts from one particular category only? Possible??
Jekyll requires you to generate your site. Dropplets generates pages on each request.
Jekyll runs on your machine, and is written in Ruby. Dropplets runs on your server, and is written in PHP.
Jekyll's posts require very minimal metadata, and use a key/value pairing system with YAML. Dropplets' posts require a ton of metadata, and the same metadata for every post, and in a specific order, and you can't add arbitrary metadata.
----
I don't think Dropplets has categories, but I may be mistaken.
it's a little discouraging, however, that the issue queue has so many pull requests, comments, etc. without comment.
i love the concept of simplicity and i'm sure the maintainers have a roadmap in mind. it'd be nice if that was communicated a bit so i can know how simple they plan to keep it.
But who knows, maybe Dropplets is the one.
Plus, it's pretty. Which is always a nice bonus.
----
If you're not averse to paying for something, Statamic looks really awesome.
As long as its price is reasonable, I don't mind paying for a CMS, but it looks like Anchor fit to my needs better than Statamic. All I want from a CMS is to have its own search and markdown support. That's it. I don't care much about themes and all that. I'm perfectly fine with having white background and black text on top of it centered on the page as a "theme".
It seems cool, it also seems like a little bit of work could be put into making it more accessible to people who didn't write it.
If I zoom out all the way, there's still no indication you can scroll down, because the page "helpfully" hides everything from you.
It's pretty bad.
I rarely complain about design issues on websites but this a case where things should really be changed.
It doesn't really matter if there's content below the page height, just that you ensure users see they have the affordance to scroll.
The seemingly only advantage is that Dropplets doesn't require a database, and its landing page is amazingly beautiful, clear, and to the point (though Ghost's "features" page is slick as well).
On a more technical note, click events seem to be propagated up the player on the landing page, closing it when toggling HD for example.
"You can host it on your laptop, or you can host it on a public server. The code is open, and so is the MIT license."
It's currently not public, so I would imagine at the moment it's all hosted on their servers, but according to their blog[0], they're going public on the 14th of October, meaning it should be self-hostable from then, one would assume.
[0] http://blog.ghost.org/ghost-0-3-1-maintenance-release/
It's not released to the GP currently.
The abysmal HN crowd, no problem. But I bet most people running a WP installation on their shared hosting are not as proficient as you believe.
yeah, setting up a dropplets server is simple... step 1: already have a server set up.
who are these "simple" platforms supposed to be for if you already have to have a "server" set up that you can "upload" to? if i can set up a server, why can't i set up a database?
this just seems dumb.