It's a shame they don't seem to try to address the divide between CMS's and static sites.

Most WordPress sites could just be static, but WordPress has a nice editor interface, so they're not - unless you use a SSG plugin. Building that into the core workflow (which I believe Astro supports) and giving users a nice hosted editor that produces a static site would be welcome innovation.

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pwython 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I've been migrating a few Wordpress sites from Wordpress to Astro + Strapi recently, working in 'hybrid mode' so the entire site is static except for post previews in Strapi (only that one route is SSR).

Editing content in Strapi, once customized with CKEditor and such, is Wordpressy enough for the human Editors familiar with WP.

So far I'm loving the stack.

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MattieTK 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

EmDash with some aggressive caching and SWR is effectively this, and we're getting closer to that every day. When the cost of maintaining the data part of the CMS is effectively free, you're basically working with a static site anyway.

	▲	Y-bar 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I haven’t used Wordpress for a few years. But with WP Super Cache (1) we also always did pretty much that: On saving a post/page the static HTML would be written to a cache directory and be the default content served to visitors. [1] https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-super-cache/

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RobotToaster 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The issue with static sites is they can't do comments.

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input_sh 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Astro would call that an island: https://docs.astro.build/en/concepts/islands/

I guess this is our answer to the question of why Cloudflare acquired it in the first place.

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qingcharles 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I bet 99.9% of live Wordpress sites no longer have comments enabled.

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spankalee 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

So many WordPress sites don't have comments.

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Closi 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

They can - it’s just more complex.

You just put the comments into something like firebase/supabase etc or use one of many off the shelf solutions. Free tier is fine.

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RobotToaster 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Is it still a static site then?

You could just do it with CGI scripts, without the external dependencies, but that isn't really static either.

	▲	Closi 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Depends what you would call that architecture then I guess! I run my local theatre website by writing the posts in markdown, and then have some github actions which use Hugo to turn it in to a static site and then uploads the content to an S3 bucket. The site itself has dynamic content like within-website ticket buying from eventbrite and a contact form that sends email using an external service. It also calls in things like google analytics. Does this still count as static? Personally I think so, Even though there are 'dynamic' elements. IMO static refers more about how the content is served rather than saying that the content can’t be ‘dynamic’ as lots of Wordpress sites have static/non interactive content but still regenerate the html on each page load.
	▲	DANmode 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I run static sites for my clients, with embedded forms. Performance says they’re definitely still static sites!

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egypturnash 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

"Just" sure is doing a lot of heavy lifting in this sentence.