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    <title>Pipelean</title>
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    <description>Recent content on Pipelean</description>
    <generator>Hugo -- gohugo.io</generator>
    <language>en-uk</language>
    <lastBuildDate>Wed, 25 Jan 2017 18:18:24 +0100</lastBuildDate>
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      <title>Static, serverless CMS solution for the humans</title>
      <link>http://pipelean.com/post/cms-static-serverless/</link>
      <pubDate>Wed, 25 Jan 2017 18:18:24 +0100</pubDate>
      
      <guid>http://pipelean.com/post/cms-static-serverless/</guid>
      <description>&lt;p&gt;It&amp;rsquo;s always a good time to get rid of some old stuff.
This is finally the time for old, cumbersome, heavy, higly coupled CMS solutions you&amp;rsquo;ve been forced to deal with since that horrible time in technology and internet between 2001 and 2008.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;We&amp;rsquo;re here to finally free you.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;h2 id=&#34;prerequisites&#34;&gt;Prerequisites&lt;/h2&gt;

&lt;p&gt;You know how web sites are built, and understand what an HTML template engine do in a CMS solution. You know what a CMS solution is: a templating engine that can typically be extended with some form of plugin system, a Web dashboard for admins and content editors. Not much more.
You are a developer or a developer manager or someone who deal with people who build web sites and are looking for a better solution than your old CMS.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;You are not afraid of change.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;h2 id=&#34;why&#34;&gt;Why&lt;/h2&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Static sites are good, and static generators make it easy to build them. The drawback is that content is a Markdown file inside the source code folders, and that is really &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; content editors friendly.
That&amp;rsquo;s why projects like Forestry are starting (is a brand new startup,  launched in mid 2016): to offer administration and content editor features with a Web interface for sites built with a static generator like Hugo or Jekyll, without forcing users to know Fit or how all this works under the hood. They will present a Wordpress like but much simpler Web interface and both a Markdown and a WYSIWYG editor.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;h2 id=&#34;in-a-nutshell&#34;&gt;In a nutshell&lt;/h2&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Hugo is a powerful templating engine: offers internationalization and is possible to easily build reusable HTML snippets to embed code from external sources and data sources (plugins, without the trash). Also has blogging capabilities,  support different templates for different pages, automatically generates RSS, sitemap and so on. In short, Hugo does the templating engine part of a CMS solution.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;A Hugo project contains the templates, the style and has a separate folder with the content, that is written in Markdown. Yes, the content is there, not in a database and this is &lt;strong&gt;good&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;A Hugo website needs to be built to generate the actual HTML to be puslished. This means that everytime a template file or a content file in the Hugo project is modified, you have to run the Hugo build for your site to reflect the changes. Building a Hugo projects mean launching a script in the command line. Then you have to upload the updated HTML to the CDN where is published.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Is clear that this last two steps is where things get nasty for non techy people. This is exactly what we&amp;rsquo;re going to solve in this article.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Spoiler: we solve this using Forestry.io, the first of what I think will be a generation of product like this. There are a few pieces to put in line for this to work smoothly. We do not use a API-first CMS solution for a number of reason which I do not explain here but basically because is more complicated, very expensive and for most website is just an over-engineered solution that nobody really need.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;h2 id=&#34;how&#34;&gt;How&lt;/h2&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Assume we have a Hugo project on a Git repository.
We setup Forestry to do the build in the cloud for us. Forestry will get the code from somewhere, like the Git repository, build the source and publish the result to a CDN, like Amazon S3 or Github pages or, my choice, Aerobatic.
This last choice allows me to have everything on Bitbucket: the source and the generated website, all in one convenient place.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Forestry will then provide the Web Dashboard for non-tech people to administer the site and create or edit content. Everytime a content file is edited and saved in Forestry, the change is pushed to the Git source branch. This triggers the build and the updated website is finally rendered in the Git hosting branch.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;This means everytime content is saved from the Dashboard, a git push happen. Yes. Also means that everytime a push happens, the website is built. Yes, but &lt;strong&gt;I hope&lt;/strong&gt; with a timer.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;h2 id=&#34;advantages&#34;&gt;Advantages&lt;/h2&gt;

&lt;ul&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Hugo is developer friendly. Wordpress and the rest are not. period. this meanse better development time, happier developers, higher productivity, higher codebase quality&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Code is just HTML/CSS. Code is reusable. This is good.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Static sites are fast as hell. Users are happy, Google is happy and the marketing guys are very happy.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Markdown editor is good.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Easy way to load data from CSV or JSON files, without paying the load time to get them from API everytime (or create a cache)&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Forestry dashboard is clean and simple, nothing useless there. Thinkg about your old CMS dashboard. Or don&amp;rsquo;t. Just relax, that&amp;rsquo;s the past.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;/ul&gt;

&lt;h2 id=&#34;conclusions&#34;&gt;Conclusions&lt;/h2&gt;

&lt;p&gt;This will finally restore the balance in the Force and allow you to throw away tons of useless tools and code and plugins and cumbersome solutions that fixes a problem created by other cumbersome solutions.
This is a clean and elegant solution which is also scalable and with high performance, at development time as well as at serving content to your user and to search engines.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;h2 id=&#34;credits&#34;&gt;Credits&lt;/h2&gt;</description>
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      <title>Gradients are back</title>
      <link>http://pipelean.com/post/gradient/</link>
      <pubDate>Thu, 12 Jan 2017 12:25:38 +0100</pubDate>
      
      <guid>http://pipelean.com/post/gradient/</guid>
      <description>&lt;p&gt;Gradients are back, and it is a great news!&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;There&amp;rsquo;s nothing better than gradients in this world.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&#34;http://pipelean.com/uploads/2017/01/23/Screenshot%20at%2019-26-19-1.png&#34; alt=&#34;&#34; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
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    <item>
      <title>About</title>
      <link>http://pipelean.com/about/</link>
      <pubDate>Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>http://pipelean.com/about/</guid>
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&lt;h3 id=&#34;failing-for-10-years-together&#34;&gt;Failing for 10 years, together&lt;/h3&gt;

&lt;p&gt;We combine UX design with top-class and modern technology solutions with the experience to lead small teams to get the job done in a new way.&lt;/p&gt;
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