The problem is that right now the pathways to quickly bootstrap a WordPress site with a good enough, customized theme are hidden under SaaS providers, like hosting companies. Use InstaWP or ZipWP, for example, and you can start in just minutes.
But while you can start in just minutes, you don't have that publishable site that you have in your mind, in minutes.
It takes hours to learn where to find what. To select a good theme. To find the right plugins. To remove the wrong plugins. To then fix some error that comes from removing the plugin. Or to fix an error from installing the wrong one. Experienced WP devs even ask hours for this: people who do this all day, for a living, will charge you hours to build this for you.
Sure, you may be lucky and have some goal in mind that happens to be ridiculous easy with WP. Or you may not have something in mind and just go-with-the-flow to end somewhere that happens to be easy with WP (a good strategy really).
But, in general, I have something in mind. A landing page for a startup. Or the outlines of a webshop, or a simple blog even, and it will take me hours or days banging against WP to get there, whereas with hugo or jekyll that's less than a few hours of banging.
This is great as it is, but I would love to see support for posts in plain HTML. There's a huge potential for static sites generated by Webflow and other platforms like it. Hosting costs are the biggest issue with these platforms. It would help so many designers and marketing teams that don't have access to a developer or simply don't want (or don't know how) to set up themselves a Jekyll, Next.js, Astro, Hugo, or Nuxt website.
You can save `.html` and `.mdx` single files, I just don't have great support for collections yet (I'll need to sort out a few things as right now it expects a frontmatter to display the table).
Given the increasing number of people using page builders and no-code tools, these novelties are, in practice, either invisible or delayed for a large portion of websites until it makes business sense for the companies behind the software powering these tools.
I think in general that the accessibility of CSS and HTML5 kinda sucks.
Hypercard and Flash are both great examples of the sort of creative cottage industries that can emerge when you provide more accessible means of building stuff. There's like a generations of designers that grew up playing with these sorts of tools.
I'm glad Figma is around now, but yeah, the creative authoring experience is really sad these days. We don't even have a modern equivalent to Dreamweaver or Frontpage anymore :/
Logseq, which is a note-taking app much like Obsidian, can also generate a static site from its notes natively. It has a mobile app, which is very helpful when you are on the move. It is quite idiosyncratic, but it works well if you know your way around it.
https://discuss.logseq.com/t/how-to-publish-your-logseq-as-a....
Another option is Pinegrow, an NW.js desktop-based website development app that uses plain HTML, CSS, and JS, just like Dreamweaver. Its UI is quite complicated, but you can hide what's not necessary for you. It also includes a bare-bones CMS, but it's not mandatory to use. It's not open-source, though.
Logseq doesn't seem to be able to edit an HTML file. I checked out Logseq when I was considering Obsidian, and I found it quite complicated (it seems closer to Workflowy...). I'd love to see something like this succeed...
Pinegrow - this seems to be close to what I'm thinking... a visual HTML editor. But wow, the interface is complicated. Looks like they've crammed AI/ChatGPT into it, a news reader widget (?!). $150/year price tag. - A simple, open-source app along these lines would be great.
Downloading and using fonts available on Fontesk can be a huge trap. Read it's “Licensing” page. It's simply not safe to use fonts downloaded there, one should really use it only for discovery, at best.
