Back with a Vengeance, I mean Freebie
Let's get one thing out of the way first, yes this was pretty much vibe-coded, but it's okay, you can trust me I am a software engineer. My go-to tools are Windsurf (referral link, you get 250 prompt credits) and Lovable (not a referral link, but help me upvote if you are a user too ✌️), and I did this over a span of a little less than 2 weeks (pretty much) full-time, see first commit.
Why StaticPress?
The idea for StaticPress came when I started using JSON files in an S3 bucket as an "easy" way to manage content for a static site that I built for a client, the static site would pull the JSON files for things like customer testimonials, locations, things that do need to change from time to time, but not often to warrant a full-on CMS.
My intention then was to manage the changes for my client (using any one of the tools out there to connect to a bucket, modify files, etc), but I didn't really relish doing all that grunt work for the rest of my life, but still it wouldn't make sense to get the client to pay for CMS given that static sites come free on DigitalOcean's App Platform (referral link, you get $200 in credit, I get $50, it's not fair at all if you ask me), if you have an app hosted with them.
I was also intending to build marketing sites for apps that I would be building using the same store-data-in-JSON-S3-bucket technique for them, with the intention of course to host them for free on DigitalOcean. I looked for something resembling a self-hosted JSON editor for S3 kinda thing, but to not avail.
Then I thought, how hard could it be to build one from scratch, everyone and their dog seem to be vibe coding new apps into existence everyday 🤷♂️
Building it.
I thought it would maybe take a few days especially with AI on my side, but I spent quite some time getting the UI right, and making it work in demo-mode with fake data (which was how it started off), and then also in a production setting, and when I finally looked up from my screen 10 days had passed. I also spent an unreasonable amount of time fighting with serverless functions on DigitalOcean, I still can't get logging, or log forwarding, to work, so I guess you could say I lost.
For those interested in how this works, StaticPress is deployed as a static site, but any action that requires modifying content, reading private content, authentication, etc is performed in serverless functions (which I hate to inform you is actually powered by servers, ugh). This allows us to have a CMS that operates "24/7" but needs no web or database process (read: it's free, as in beer).
StaticPress supports the following data types:
Text, numbers, booleans
Dates, datetimes
Email, URLs
Dropdown options
Select from predefined options
Coordinates
Give the demo a spin here.
I like free beer but...
Yeah it's released as GPL License 3.0 ok?
What's next
I'm quite happy with the set of features it's "launching" with, but distribution it isn't as straightforward as I wished. It appears that DigitalOcean's 1-click deploy button doesn't support serverless functions. You can spec it, and it will appear, but it won't find any of the functions within the repository (confirmed with support, it no work).
This means that deployment will as simple as "1-click, fill in a bunch of environmental values, and then some terminal commands", so stay tuned for that. I also intend to work on some onboarding gaps, currently there is no functionality to create the initial schema.json file, or the data files themselves, but this will be handled seamlessly.
And screenshot.
You've read this far, it would help bigly if you:
Upvote my project on Lovable's Launched platform
Follow or star static-press on GitHub
Use my referral links for Windscribe and/or DigitalOcean
I hope that the referrals links are sanguine, they will help reduce my burn rate ❤️
