I’m making this request on behalf of a community I’m part of, which has some fairly specific requirements that we’re struggling to fill. Basically, we’re an art and writing group that makes extensive use of building our own old-school webpages (almost exclusively HTML, some of us use some CSS as well). This group has been running for over 25 years (late 90s), and back in the old days our website building needs were met by Frontpage, Dreamweaver, and the like. Most of these are gone now, obviously, and we’ve had trouble finding a more modern equivalent that does what we want.
We have experimented with CMS options, but had various issues arising from this - lack of customisation/design flexibility (each individual page we create often has a completely unique design based on the content, whereas most CMS is focused on creating a cohesive design template for a whole site), security problems (especially WordPress), being locked into that CMS and unable to export to a different one or plain HTML, etc.
What we need:
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WYSIWYG interface - although most of us know basic HTML and some CSS, we’re not coders and primarily work visually. We are not aiming for professional-looking websites to sell products, and there are no databases or scripts to worry about. The ability to be able to pick colours, layouts, etc, and then write text and add images is what we’re after.
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Downloadable - we need actual software that we can run locally on our own computers. We all have our own webhosting with FTP access, so we just want to be able to create the HTML files and not be tied into a particular host or platform. If there’s a web-based option that will allow us to simply create a page and then download the final result as a usable HTML file that we can upload to our own hosting, then that option will be considered.
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Easy to set up - tech knowledge varies in the group, so something with an easy installation is needed. I found a couple of options that exist only as Github repositories, and the explanations of how to get them working went right over our heads.
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Free - we’re all poor, starving artists. That said, we’d consider a paid-for option if it was low cost (<£15/$20 per licence), but we’re not in a position to drop £100 each on software.
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Will consider CMS options if it allows each page to be individually and uniquely designed, and does not lock you into using only that CMS - easy export to plain HTML/CSS would be a requirement. With a 25-year old community that has outlived a number of platforms and hosts, we’re wary of anything that tries to lock us into a specific platform. The CMS would nevertheless need to be relatively easy to install on webhosting, due to the aforementioned varying degrees of tech knowledge. Knowledge of Javascript, PHP, etc is extremely limited.
In summary, we’re maintaining a hobby community started in the late 90s when we were teenagers, and we’re looking for FOSS options that replace the Frontpage and Dreamweaver type software we used back then.
Thanks! :)
Eclipse is a popular IDE that’s super customizable and extensible. They have a huge marketplace of plugins. And swear I remember there being a WYSIWYG editor for it, but now that I’m searching, it seems there might not be anymore.
I definitely understand the pain though.
I’m a web dev who got their start back in the 90s. I’m also an enthusiast for classic computers and restoring them. One of the biggest problems is that older web browsers won’t view anything with HTTPS, have no idea how to render modern web languages, and modern browsers make a mess of classic sites (though this is also an effect of much larger screen resolutions). So I was working on a project to try to build sites on the modern web that older browsers could view, using like HTML3, with no CSS nor JS. I had this ambitious idea that maybe there was a way to create a CMS that could build older sites like that. I was trying to use a headless CMS that I could take content from with a modern frontend for a modern experience, and then build a backend that could wrap the content up in 90s-tastic style. And it’s possible if you want just a generic, bland and basic site. But if you want anything that looks like things did then, it’s impossible. Like you mentioned, everything was so bespoke. so often pages then were built largely with images: navigation, layout, styling, etc. Everything was so unique, custom, and specific to the site. It wasn’t like now where everything is based on the exact same grid, or Bootstrap theme, or WP theme.
The sad part is that there were so many WYSIWYG editors back then that you could use, and even web-based ones (Angelfire, Tripod, Geocities, etc) but all that’s gone now. I did find a copy of Dreamweaver 1 and 2 on MacintoshGarden and gave that a spin for a bit on an old PowerMac G4. That was fun, but I can’t remember if they had a Windows version during the 90s. Though as hard as it is to get even 10 year old software to run on Win 10 and 11, that probably wouldn’t work anyway.
Long-winded way to say: the divide between the 90s and now, wrt web tech, is vast. Not sure how close this is to what you’re trying to do, but thought I’d share it.
Yep, the divide between the 90s and now is so huge! Most of our old content does actually work in modern browsers, surprisingly, but we definitely get some weirdness - alignments of various elements just get completely thrown off, for example. As you note, it’s definitely partly due to larger screen resolutions. Where we’re running into problems is basically the older WYSIWYG editors just can’t handle any of the newer web standards properly, so as soon as we try to make things that have… let’s call it the same aesthetic as the late 90s/early 00s, but with adjustments to make it more modern-browser-friendly, the editor can’t render it properly. So I’d been hoping to find a modern editor that knows what the current iterations of HTML and CSS are, but will still let us work visually!
Shockingly, it is possible to get the early 00s versions of Dreamweaver and Frontpage working on Windows 10/11. There’s a couple people in the group with Dreamweaver from back then, and I managed to get the 2003 version of Frontpage working. They just don’t have any clue what to do with CSS that makes, say, navigation easier or the site more adaptive to desktop and mobile screen resolutions. I remember even in the late 00s, Frontpage was struggling with CSS.
I’ve actually tried out the most current version of Dreamweaver, too. I decided to go back to school last year, and the university gives everyone the full Adobe Creative Cloud suite, which includes Dreamweaver 2021. And it does actually do the job it’s supposed to do reasonably well - apart from this bug that just drives me nuts, where it basically just multiplies spaces in the middle of blocks of text and then will not delete them. But obviously even though I have access to this, it’s proprietary software requiring a monthly subscription, so it’s not a viable option for the whole community.