Free static site generator for small restaurants and cafes

Squarespace is like $20/mo for a basic site promoting your Brick and Mortar business. That includes domain, hosting, and a template/CMS. It's not that pricey.

A webapp or gui WYSIWYG static generator with basic git support abstracted away would go far for many. Just let it push to some private repo which cloudflare pages or similar would deploy off of.

It really feels like the only part of a non-static site most want is an editor. I absolutely loathe the matter but I do see why some restaurants only maintain a facebook page for their online presence.

> I'm just surprised we haven't seem some app that can act like a wordpress admin page but generating a static output you can host for free or very cheap somewhere.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44391535

(I'm not affiliated with it)

Google Sites exists. Buy a domain, point it at a free Google site. So easy a religion major can make a site that looks pretty decent (ha ha, only serious; I thought he'd used Wordpress at first) for just the cost of domain registration.

Frontmatter CMS is a VSCodium plugin that works as a somewhat user-friendly CMS for the likes of Hugo. https://frontmatter.codes/

I set it up for my brother to run his static blog, and it's quite good if you like that kind of thing. There are some quirks where it gets confused if you rename mycoolarticle.md, so I still prefer using notepad++ and git and CLI for mine.

There are at least a few CMS editors for static sites intended for non-technical/less-technical users. They often still require someone technical to setup (config files and OAuth connections to GitHub, for example) but then provide an experience somewhat like what one would expect from the WordPress Admin Page.

Two examples I've briefly worked with:

Decap CMS (formerly Netlify CMS): https://decapcms.org/

Lume CMS: https://lume.land/cms/

Honestly, there are some easier ways out there now, although of course no solution is perfect.

For non-technical people I'd recommend the Hostinger Website Builder, Obsidian Quartz or Astro Starlight.

Although as a front-end dev I'd choose building a custom page with Astro, which has now become much easier though with good templates available + LLM assistance.

I wrote a comparison of less-technical ways to build a website here with more details: https://webdev.bryanhogan.com/start/ways-to-build/

That’s what I’ve been working on for the last few years: https://palacms.com (MIT) Not ready to announce the V3 RC yet (need to fill out the starter sites) but it’s working well if you wanna give it a spin - runs & deploys on Railway’s free tier.

I've updated, this now has Zero Runtime js, Not a single line of js runs when this page loads in your browser.

Have you looked at micro.blog? Plans start at $1 per month.

I’m building something like this…

NextJS + Git + Vercel.

how about something like feather.so? publish a website / blog from your Notion...

haven't used it, but looks like a great idea!

This is exactly what we're trying to build with https://github.com/accretional/statue - you can email me or hit me up on Linkedin to get early access to our free static site hosting (which our new site for the project at https://statue.dev runs on, and which will Soon™ have a public-facing product doing exactly what you just asked for)

Basically you'll be able to edit the markdown for your site in a souped up version of our lightly reskinned vscode IDE at https://brilliant.mplode.dev and instantly publish/preview the changes in the same browser tab in a pane. Brilliant comes with a full Linux environment running in a container on our cloud platform, and building a Statue static site is already a one-command operation. The little UI we're working on let's nontechnical people skip that and just edit files and click buttons to make changes and publish it, though.

Here's a one-liner that will get you an entire static site with content (not the landing page yet, though) you can edit via markdown:

yes | npx sv create . --template minimal --types ts --no-add-ons --install npm && npm install statue-ssg && npx statue init && npm install && npm run dev

No one should need an entire PostScript interpreter to see the soup of the day, either. A restaurant menu is text and images. HTML and CSS are perfect for text and images.

I agree with no JS, but why PDF over HTML? Hard-wrapping for letter-sized paper (ok, a PDF doesn't need to be letter-sized, but most menus are approximately that) with crapshoot reflow options for soft-wrapping in certain viewer apps is pretty dicey on a phone, mitigated only slightly by rotating the phone sideways.

The only benefit I can think of is if it leads to more frequent updates by the restaurant, due to limited skillset.

PDF is an enormous pain in the tits to view on a phone and has significant accessibility issues for people using assistive technologies.

It's not even about blind people. People with ADHD or dyslexia use assistive technology, which frequently makes an absolute horlicks of interpreting PDF. It's one of the reasons I'm trying to move a lot of documentation at work away from PDF and onto just straight HTML.

Plain old HTML, with thin CSS on it to make it not be black-and-white Times New Roman. Kicking it oldschool.

PDF:s are not great on mobile. And you can’t easily translate them (I often translate restaurant menus when they are on a website with just 2 clicks)

To be fair this project uses zero 3rd party npm modules for runtime. The total runtime JS it uses is 1.76kB in size.

I agree. There are lots of free AstroJS themes for restaurants that generate static html that you can host somewhere like Firebase hosting for free.

- https://astro.build/themes/details/astropie/

- https://astro.build/themes/details/astrorante/

- https://astro.build/themes/details/tastyyy-restaurant-websit...

What an exhausting solution to a made-up problem. This is exactly the kind of functionality JS was made to provide. There's a lot more JS in the PDF.js renderer modern browsers, and if you're not using a modern browser it likely wouldn't render at all. As others have pointed out, you're asking restaurants to throw away mobile traffic, screen readers, anyone not on a mainstream desktop browser to save ~20 lines of code in a programming language you don't like.

Remember during Covid where every restaurant's menu was a QR code on the table that linked to a PDF in S3?

A PDF can't get the user halfway through the delivery process before seeing the soups.

No one is browsing the internet without JS today (within margin of error). Whether or not this "should" be the case, it is.

I wish restaurants would just make a homepage with menu _and_ opening hours.

In my area most restaurants have no website.

If they have a website it's often very hard to find their opening hours. Under 'contact'? Nope! At the footer? Nay! Maybe somewhere hidden in the menu PDF? With luck... Outside their homepage at google maps? Maybe. On their Tripadvisor page? Hahaha! Funny! Not.

PDF is a terrible experience on mobile

The soup shows for me without JS.

Nobody should need a PDF renderer to see the soups.

Actually, nobody should need an XML parser to see the soups either.

As an embdded engineer I'm always disappointed at how much processing power and RAM is needed just to display websites with just images and text. The vast majority of them do not need javascript

No one should need PDFs to see the soups when they can be handled perfectly fine with CSS scoped to print and save to PDF....

/s

ah yeah, sorry work in progress. There is a link to the repo https://github.com/Local-Cafe/localcafe-lite

I'm getting NXDOMAIN, and various online resolution tools [0] show the same.

[0] https://mxtoolbox.com/SuperTool.aspx?action=a%3alocalcafe.or...

There is some code for looking up the geo lat/log of locations at compile. not sure how you would do that. But yeah outside of that your are mostly correct.

I used elixir because thats what I know and love so it was mostly just a personal choice rather than a technical one.

First: https://github.com/Local-Cafe/localcafe-lite/blob/main/LICEN...

Second: pixabay

Third: Yeah that's the challenge I'm working on at the moment. Thanks for the feed back.

I do plan on cleaning up the repo so that you are not starting with the example and also plan on making a small tutorial video to show how much effort it takes to setup.

They are markdown files, if you can't manage a markdown file then you are not likely gonna have any easier of a time working in wordpress or anything for that matter.

We assume people are so stupid, its not they are stupid, they have to learn wordpress admin, square space's admin, wixx, they all have a learning curve. The issue is time and effort. If the process is simple even if not elegant its still simple.

In my case you are logging into github and navigating to a folder vs an admin and navigating to a specific section. Editing file directly in github vs hitting save on some form and site deploys via github actions without any other need. If anything my system offers version control baked in with about the same level of effort.

this is my biggest issue. if i think about my sister who is running a small patissery, she has issues even with a laptop. she lives almost entirely on her phone. so either the documentation has to be come a whole lot better. Wordpress was started this way.

Why not both? If you're deciding where to go for lunch, it's very useful to have the menu online