---
path: "/posts/cms"
date: "2022-07-19T23:19:51.246Z"
title: "CMS & Static Site Generators"
type: "wiki"
level: "1"
style: "prose"
image: ""
description: ""
note: "Max Fowler"
---

the two cms and static site-generators I'm most interested in are:

[lichen](https://lichen.sensorstation.co/) 

[gatsby-mdx](https://www.gatsbyjs.com/docs/glossary/mdx/)


this site was made using gatsby and [kiezpilz.de](http://kiezpilz.de) was made using lichen 

I appreciate that lichen is just four files of php. its so simple and lightweight and beautiful. 
[@soapdog](https://andregarzia.com/) was able to quickly make a fork that supports [lichen-with-markdown](https://github.com/soapdog/lichen-with-markdown) to allow for inline-links (which gemtext does not support)

I also enjoyed discussing with [@trav](https://teafry.me/) that "maybe php isn't bad" ... what if that is just an idea we have, in part constructed by silicon valley facebook-react hype cycles? 
what if php is actually pretty good at what it does? 

on a related note, I've enjoyed thinking of wordpress as folk technology. its free, its open source, its used by millions for practical purposes. 
as much as people hate on wordpress, there's perhaps a lot to love. 

all that said, wordpress is really complicated, and while lichen is beautiful and simple and good for many things, there are some limitations to what you can do with it. 

I also appreciate that gatsby is flexible, and once set-up, its worked pretty smoothly. my biggest annoyance with gatsby, 
is that after a couple years, when I updated node for another project, the build for my site broke, even though I hadn't made any changes to the site. 
I found this very frustrating when I just wanted to make a small change to the site, and not to wrestle with webpack. 

I seem to have fixed this problem by switching to using [nvm](https://github.com/nvm-sh/nvm) to only use a specific version of node for building my gatsby site, 
and recording in my readme.md which version of node I use to build the site. Now I run "nvm use 14" before I ever build the site, 
and am hopeful that this will mean reproducible builds in the future, and no unexpected breakages unless I choose to make a change. 