HACKER Q&A
📣 guru4consulting

Tools that enable non-technical users to edit simple static HTML pages?


I have a static website with just plain HTML/css/js files. If a non-technical user needs to edit text content alone (no structural or design change, just plain text content), is there any tool that can help them to edit the page content via browser? may be an extension/plugin that at least captures the delta changes so that it can be sent to some backend API? The goal is to enable non-tech users to make simple changes to web page content and receive those changes in the backend.

  👤 verdverm Accepted Answer ✓
https://www.builder.io/ can drop into existing websites, static and framework. Pretty cool stuff, though unfortunately the interesting part is closed source. You can request the page once from their API and then save it for serving (rather than using their default method / setup).

https://grapesjs.com is an open source option, but will require some investment to get it working for your situation.

There is also Wordpress, Squarespace, and Webflow. Webflow has a CMS section. Netlify has some options here too, CMS system with a web UI.

I personally use Hugo (https://gohugo.io) and Webflow. Planning to use something with grapes+hugo to replace webflow.

👤 cable2600
It does ePub as well: http://www.bluegriffon.org/

Has a free edition and a paid edition with more features. WYSIWYG features like a word processor.

Don't forget that Word and LibreOffice Write can export HTML files.

👤 z3t4
I've made a web editor that you can add to a web page via iframe, or link to and add parameters to the query-string, like "fork" this website or repo, send diff to email/http-post-url. And then the user can edit the web site via source or WYSIWYG or both or with live preview.

I'm not however happy about the workflow (non technical users found it too difficult). So I wonder what workflow you had in mind...

👤 gnatman
I've been using https://carrd.co/ for a year or so and have had a good experience!
👤 dyeje
What you're looking for is called a CMS.
👤 Tomte
https://html-notepad.com/
👤 xyzzyrz
I work on https://plasmic.app. You can emit code into your codebase or fetch over an API, and it supports static site frameworks like Next and Gatsby. We are very focused on your use case, so would love to hear if this works for you.