Show HN: Dropkick – a simple CMS with an HTML or Bootstrap template

https://www.yuzoolthemes.com/dropkickcms/

by latteperday • 11 years ago

37 44 11 years ago

tschuy• 11 years ago

Definitely thought it was called "Wordpress is overkill" for a good portion of the page. Doesn't help that that's the biggest text on the page when you first load it.

Regarding the dynamic live-updating content, why? What is the use case for that?

lastly, the demo site doesn't seem to even track the edit page at all. When I loaded the admin section, there was a picture, bolded text, and some text that was different from the home page.

chunkiestbacon3• 11 years ago

I immediately got redirected to Wordpress.org, when I pressed demo... D:

beans1• 11 years ago

Reached the bottom of the page and there is Drupal's iconic droplet as the logo. It is at the start of the page too. Hopefully that doesn't last long.

latteperday7• 11 years ago

Lol - yeah I wanted a dropkick silhouette - still working on that

TD-Linux• 11 years ago

So the premise is that I should pay money for something with less features than Wordpress?

wingerlang3• 11 years ago

It's not about features, it's about the ease of setup and maintaining the pages.

If (like us) you just want a few editable pages or elements on a page for clients to edit, then here you go.

Seems fair enough. To me the value is a small site where I can just do some simple stuff.

Granted I have not really used WordPress, but I am just going to assume that there is /something/ to what they say - considering they base their whole product on it.

(And yes I have heard that WordPress is very easy to setup)

latteperday7• 11 years ago

Yes that's right WP is easy to install too but this is for maintaining smaller sites where it will shine

halayli• 11 years ago

pay more, and lose the wordpress ecosystem. How is that a good deal?

wingerlang3• 11 years ago

I wouldn't "call out" another CMS like that on the front page. Kind of rude.

joshmn• 11 years ago

WP is only overkill if you don't take advantage of its ecosystem.

thekevan2• 11 years ago

Without a free version to pique interest and start building a user base, I don't see this gaining any traction.

latteperday7• 11 years ago

Any suggestions on running a free version that's downloaded? cheers

thekevan2• 11 years ago

I'm sorry, I'm not sure what you mean. A free version of what?

sidchilling• 11 years ago

No free version is simply stupid.

mrweasel3• 11 years ago

Please stop with the "I want a free version" crap already.

It's $30, that's cheap enough that you can buy it, test it and then decide that it wasn't what you needed anyway.

Toenex• 11 years ago

It's a barrier. From personal experience new technology adoption in a company starts with an internal evangelist. If you work in a company and need to go through a procurement process to buy something before you even get to try it, you are less likely to have a play and get hooked. In a space that is awash with at least free to try alternatives it makes it that bit harder to engage with 'that guy'. The trick is making money once the whole team is using it.

tmchow• 11 years ago

You really need a freemium model for this to gain any type of traction.

latteperday7• 11 years ago

Thanks and considering :) Any advice would really appreciate it

mrweasel3• 11 years ago

For $30... Really?

I don't think there's anything wrong with ask people to pay upfront if you have good demos, videos and screenshots.

Numbers showing that freemium increase conversion would be interesting, I just do see it being worth the hassle.

Also, it's PHP, how would you avoid people just using your code and not pay? You could do a stripped down version, but that's a lot of addition work for $30... and can you strip out that much functionality from something as small as this?

ricket• 11 years ago

Typo: the pricing section says "Workpress"

latteperday7• 11 years ago

That was on-purpose but will reconsider..

static_noise• 11 years ago

I really value simplicity, security and reliability and therefore use an offline generator for static HTML pages.

I don't really see the use case for something in between a "fire and forget" static HTML site and a well administrated full featured Wordpress (or similar) CMS. As soon as you add PHP or other server side executable you'll need to update constantly and run into update problems.

nbevans• 11 years ago

WordPress is overkill it says and then in text-muted it says "REQUIRES PHP5+ AND A MYSQL DATABASE". lol?

latteperday7• 11 years ago

Point taking but it's only storing text. The overkill is referring to plugins, updating, memory needed on the server, etc..

progx• 11 years ago

Updating is necessary on any dynamic system. Your CMS will be no exception.

With more or different scopes, Plugins are necessary. And yes you can implement all needed Plugins static into a CMS, but then you have to update definitely the CMS with more potential Bugs.

And yes WordPress need better competitor.

And yes, every PHP developer in the last 15 years build his own CMS with staic site generator, without update hassle... because they never update ;-)

PebblesHD• 11 years ago

We use an in-house created 'CMS' for our basic tutorials and documents in the team, and I'm pretty proud to say that it looks and behaves almost exactly like this, right down to the edit screen. Clearly not the only ones with the idea then.

1986v• 11 years ago

Yeah, there is a $14 version of this on CodeCanyon so...good luck though!

latteperday7• 11 years ago

Thanks for the feedback everyone. This really helps a lot. When you put things out there like this you have no idea if it makes any sense so thanks again.

Wordpress is still a great solution for many projects.

However, there are a lot of web designers who need to allow clients to edit only one or two pages of a site. They don't need to change the design or add new pages or anything else. That would freak them out.

Plus - they work with static HTML templates like Bootstrap themes or other and don't want (can't) convert it to a WP theme.

Lots of solutions for this purpose are around (CushyCMS, SurrealCMS, PageLime etc) - this is another in that vein - but there are differences to all of these.

If the right project or client came up then this would work really well.

Or you could roll your own with Octopress/Jekyll.

cheers again

nik736• 11 years ago

I personally wouldn't use Dropkick, simply because you bash your "competitor" (not really since you charge 30 bucks for a simple CMS) in the first headline.

chunkiestbacon3• 11 years ago

Wow, seriously? A single meal can cost 30 bucks. As a software engineer I'm offended that people don't want to pay the price of a single meal for something that provides a lot more value. I won't buy it, because I already have a good toolset, but it seems like a good solution.

chunkiestbacon3• 11 years ago

... and also as someone who makes websites for owners of small business, having something simple is paramount. Joomla is too complicated because it does too much. Wordpress is great as blog software but not created as a cms. They need a page editor, an easy way to add something to a menu and maybe some custom dbfields like imagelists, filelist so you can output these separately in the template.

flaie• 11 years ago

I also like others don't think that bashing competitors is the way to go for you, whether your product is great or not. The price listed at the end of the page adds to the bad taste for me.

However you may notice that your Demo page has been "hacked", in a truly great way, redirecting everyone to wordpress.org.

    <p style="text-align: justify;">This is a little test.&nbsp;<em> <strong>lol</strong></em></p>
    <p style="text-align: justify;">&nbsp;</p>
    <p>
        <script>// <![CDATA[
            window.location = 'http://wordpress.org';
        // ]]></script>
    </p>

cetra3• 11 years ago

The user input is not sanitised and since it's a demo it's open for everyone to edit.

I'd suggest maybe sanitising user input on the server end so that script tags don't get through.

mcintyre1994• 11 years ago

It now has an infinite loop and I can't view it at all (oh snaps Chrome). I hate to criticise but OP - isn't this pretty irresponsible?

duiker101• 11 years ago

Wow, I am at work and it just redirected me to pornhub... that is bad taste...

neotrinity• 11 years ago

exactly... dammit...

dimxasnewfrozen• 11 years ago

"Unlike Wordpress, we allow XSS..."

krapp• 11 years ago

I guess it's a little too simple.

jmadsen• 11 years ago

"bashing competitors"?

c'mon, folks - WP runs 40% of the friggin' web, and it's a free OS project. It isn't anyone's "competitor".

WP is what most Mom & Pop shows think of when they want to make a simple website, and alternatives will continue to measure themselves against it & tell you why they fit a different niche. That's just simple marketing.

posnet• 11 years ago

Interesting, the demo seems to crash my version of chrome. Version 43.0.2357.124 (64-bit)

conradr• 11 years ago

Clicking on the Demo redirected me to a porn site pornhub?

Jhonbxl• 11 years ago

Clicking "try the demo" made FF 38.0.5 eat up 2.7Go RAM. Page was never able to load, process froze and I had to kill it. Not really what I call lightweight.

Curious to see if this picks up, seems a bit counter-intuitive to me (if the project is so small, I'd just draft up the pages myself, why bother with a full-fledge CMS?), but there are probably people who'll like that?

Show HN: Dropkick – a simple CMS with an HTML or Bootstrap template

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