Hi all. Looking for a recommendation regarding adding a blogging section to a website I have created in anvil. It would be a seperate section to the website, perhaps even using a subdomain (blog.example.com) or a seperate domain name if needed. It will allow other people to write content
So far, I have thought of the following options:
– host and spin this up using something like pelican, created static web pages that are the “blog”. This would be linked from the “anvil” portion of the website.
– create my own solution with anvil, which feels a little like reinventing the wheel.
– install with pip another package, like the pelican package above, on the anvil hosted server (if this is even possible).
Let me know your thoughts,… and thanks in advance for your help.
If it were just you writing for the blog, then I think a static site generator on a subdomain would be ideal. There’s no need to use Anvil resources for content you’re generating and that isn’t dynamic.
Since you’re allowing other people to write for the blog, you could use a static site generator hooked up to a Github repo that you all have access to, but that requires everyone be technical enough to make that work.
If you have a non-technical set of writers, reinventing the wheel in Anvil might be your best bet. You don’t need to support the full range of features of something like Wordpress, so it should be relatively straightforward. This also allows you to integrate blog content with the rest of the site.
You could also run a third-party solution (like Wordpress) on a subdomain on a different hosting service. That’d give you a feel featured blog, but be another server and software that you have to keep up to date, and integration with your Anvil app would be limited to a link going to the blog.
Installing another package in Anvil isn’t going to help much, the way that Anvil server functions work (spinning up a new instance with every server call).
then I think a static site generator on a subdomain would be ideal. There’s no need to use Anvil resources for content you’re generating and that isn’t dynamic.
With this and your last option (the wordpress type solution)–> I’m still purchasing hosting space somewhere else and pointing the subdomain to a different place than the site I’m writing in Anvil, right? (the anvil site is hosted… through anvil, on a website name I purchased through cloudflare).
With a static site solution you have options such as Render.com, which offers free hosting for static sites until you get up to a certain bandwidth (100 GB/month) from visitors. Render.com also will automatically pull from a Github branch when it’s updated, so it makes it super easy to publish new versions of the site.
With another CMS, yes, you’re purchasing hosting from somewhere other than Anvil. Depending on your anticipated traffic and blog requirements, that might point you toward creating the blog in Anvil, or toward the separate hosting. It’s a complex decision based on a number of factors.
Thanks for the recommendation: I think I have this figured out (for now).
I have a lot of other project that have a higher priority than creating a blog system in anvil… so but, if and when I do, I’ll share with the group–> having a blog “template” as a tutorial might be helpful for newbies and people who are “trying out” Anvil… might be a medium article opportunity to someone wanting to promote Anvil.