After trying to teach a non-technical friend how to manage a Jekyll site I decided there must be a way to make building a site with a SSG easier. Options like Decap, Contentful etc. do make it a bit easier but still take lots of tech knowledge to set up.

So I built Sparktype, a browser-based CMS that outputs statically-generated HTML and CSS. My goal is for it to be as easy to use as Substack or Medium, while providing all the benefits of a static site generator including openness, simplicity, speed, security and ownership.

It handles most things that you'd need from a CMS, including creating pages, image resizing, menu management, tags, collections, listings etc. I've only made two themes so far, but I'm working on a theme store and the ability to import custom themes.

Content is saved as plain Markdown + YAML frontmatter and JSON config files, so there's no lock-in and content is easily portable to other platforms. Generated sites can be exported as a zip file to upload via FTP, committed to Github or published via Netlify API.

I'm working on cross-platform client apps using Tauri which will enable more publishing options as its not limited by what can be done in a client-only environment.

The way the system works means that the Web doesn't need to be the only interface to the content - here's a simple Go-based CLI client that bypasses the HTML altogether https://github.com/sparktype-project/sparktype/tree/main/st-...

It's very early days and there are still plenty of bugs, but I'm posting now to hopefully get feedback and see what people think. Please do let me know!