Is this project still active?

[turian]

I love the idea of staticman. But I spent a few hours yesterday trying to get it working and couldn't. Previous issues discuss how some of the docs are stale. And there have been no commits since 2020.

Is this project still active? Or is there a more recent alternative I should consider?

p.s. thank you for your hard work, staticman seems awesome and I want to use it

[ka2in]

Hi @turian:
Did you follow the steps described under the following URL?
https://staticman.net/docs/getting-started.html
You will need option 1 for step 1 if you intend to use GitHub, and option 1 for step 2.
Note, however, that Heroku will stop offering free dynos and subscriptions starting November 2022. Therefore, you should deploy Staticman on a different platform than Heroku. Check the issues here #451 to find a suitable alternative.
Steps 3 and 4 are self-explanatory.

[RyanTG]

staticman still works well! Sure there are a lot of issues and not a lot of recent commits. But you can still successfully set it up using the current instructions. If you have more details into the issues you experienced, then it's more likely that others can assist.

[erikw]

This is a relevant question. As of #451 the instructions for Heroku, which is what most seems to use, will no longer work.

[jamesmortensen]

They've been looking for maintainers for the past year and a half. #428. So far, no one has really had the time to step up. At the same time, people are creating forks, but changes and improvements are getting fragmented since there is no one to triage pull requests. I'm not sure how to solve this problem. Maybe creating a Slack group to discuss all of the forks and pull requests would be a good start, kind of like crowdsourcing the pull requests.

[zanechua]

I was having issues with staticman and the fact that the free tier is gone in Heroku means I had to find another solution to host the app. staticman wasn't designed for lambdas so I decided to rewrite one that works in cloudflare workers.

Have made it pretty straightforward to deploy and is compatible with the staticman site configuration file as well.

https://github.com/zanechua/comment-worker

There's stuff missing at the moment as it was just something that I quickly put together for my needs. I made some improvements but we're not at feature parity to staticman at the moment. Look at the meta issue for more information.

[hoijui]

@jamesmortensen I would recommend, to look at the forks you mentioned, and for those that made changes in a reasonable quality, ask the maintainers if they would accept to become administrators (together with you and the others that accept), and then promote them.
Having 3 mediocre admins that are all just rarely active is better then having one high-quality one which is not active at all, because in the later case, death of the project is certain. also, the current version will be available anyway, in case future changes would make staticman worse. I did that with a few projects of mine, and I am very happy with it.

[alexwaibel]

Hey folks, appreciate your interest in this project. As others have noted, this project has been looking for a new maintainer for some time now. I like the cloudflare worker approach, it's probably how I would architect this project now that Heroku free tier is gone. I shared some thoughts in the discussion thread here. Feel free to discuss alternatives or forks and as always, we're open to someone stepping up to maintain this project again. If the state of this project is daunting, maybe @zanechua would be open to contributions on comment-worker which may be easier for new maintainers to get up to speed with.

[zanechua]

Thanks @alexwaibel

Happy to take any code contributions to

https://github.com/zanechua/comment-worker

to get to feature parity to staticman.

The meta issue is where we're currently at today and what needs to be done.

[iambumblehead]

It would be so great if there were a way to host comments entirely from github or gitlab. Thinking aloud here, something like the following might work?

• where comments are displayed, click a link to visit a "step 1" page hosted at github or gitlab
• url to "step 1" page includes query params that can be later used to redirect the window in the correct way
• "step 1" page detects if the user has a session w/ github or gitlab (not sure if this is viable...)
  • if no session, user is presented a login link and invited to refresh or reload when signed in,
  • else, user is presented a PR/MR page link and shown a nice little description of how comments must added.
    • test pipeline runs for submitted PR/MR and verifies the submission is correct
• PR/ MR page can possibly can be improved with a template,
• user submits a PR/MR that, in some way, when site re-deploys, comment appears in a list of other messages,
• an attempt should be made to specify the format of the message data in order that it can be improved over time
• if success, free comments and discussion, no self-hosting needed

Just a brainstorm and I hope it is not rude to leave this :)

A comments-specific project with needed pipelines could be setup, then copy/pasted for creating new projects on gitlab/github. The deploy pipeline could serve json payloads requested by another app rendering them as comments.

Another approach; the user creates a reply or comment at the static site then, when they want to submit the comment, render out the exact contents of a file including any headers and the main comment and link the user to the "create new file" page with instructions to paste results there and submit them as a new file. This could work very well because the scripts used to generate the comments file and later validate that file in an MR/PR pipeline would not be impractical to maintain.