Hey HN, it’s been about three years since you sent my open source CMS, Primo, to the front page (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23820201), inspiring me to quit my cushy remote job at the height of the pandemic to work on it full-time (naive and impulsive, I agree). Life has been pretty interesting since then. I’ve burned through my savings, lost my primo.af domain name to the Taliban, and convinced my wife to become a dev/designer to help me.

But I’m proud of what we’ve built over that time, and seeing the incredible effect it’s had on people learning web development, putting up personal websites, and managing client sites has further solidified our belief in the power and simplicity of this approach. Today we’re excited to announce the public beta for Primo version 2, which introduces full on-page content editing, page building, and more.

I initially created Primo because I was fed up with building websites, and the nontechnical people I was building them for struggled to manage them. My freelance projects involved brittle WordPress themes and poking around dashboards and juggling plugins; accessing the site’s code was so complex that it wasn’t even in the question. As an agency dev, I experienced the complexity of building custom sites in monolithic CMSs and the heavy-handedness of using meta-frameworks and headless CMSs for landing pages and brochure sites. And as a coding instructor, I saw my students face the daunting landscape that people learning to leverage the web face today - CLIs and APIs, package managers and bundlers, frameworks and meta-frameworks . No approach existed that provided a streamlined and approachable path to building, managing, developing, and hosting websites - particularly for common websites (i.e. 90% of the internet) like blogs, landing pages, and brochure sites.

Primo is our attempt to build that tool. At a basic level, Primo is a CMS - it gives you the ability to easily manage website content - but its functionality includes the other concerns that also go into running a website, like page building, code editing, static site generation, and deploying to Github/hosting. Blocks are written in Svelte (i.e. HTML, CSS, and JS), so they’re reactive and style-encapsulated. By combining all these elements into a single interface, you can create, manage, modify, and deploy new websites in a fraction of the time. And since they’re static sites, you get all the cost, security, scaling, and speed benefits of serverless too.

Primo isn’t intended for people that prefer the WYSIWYG design controls of SquareWixFlow but instead for anybody who wants to leverage HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to fully control and customize their websites while providing a dead-simple content editing experience to themselves and their nontechnical friends/clients/collaborators. It’s for people who feel frustrated by no-code tools and proprietary platforms, and those who want something simpler that still offers the power of code.

Beyond that, Primo is an effort to keep the web in the hands of individuals. Our hope is that providing a more approachable tool for web publishing will move the needle on technical literacy and put free expression on the web in the grasp of anyone who wants it so they can’t be as readily corralled into black boxes and walled gardens.

If you’d like to be a part of that mission, or just want an easier way to build websites, I hope you'll consider Primo.

Mateo