Post author here: As others said, it's a CMS for static site generators.

Traditional CMS's are opinionated server side applications that live outside of the site developer's workflow, and are subject to maintenance and a high potential for getting hacked. The advantage is eschewing all of that for a hackable React app that literally lives on a page on your site, and gaining the speed and security benefits of static development.

To better understand the methodology, check out https://JAMstack.org.

This doesn't replace Jekyll, it's a CMS for those sites.

The advantage of these tools is that you can get a statically generated site without having to use terminal commands or git. It's perfect if you're setting up a simple site for non-technical clients, then they can manage their own content and you don't have to babysit Wordpress or worry about scaling.

It's actually great for highly complex, high traffic setups as well - Smashing Magazine was a conglomerate site using Wordpress, Kirby, Rails, and Shopify, and are now entirely static (10x faster literally) and using Netlify CMS for content management. If you haven't checked out their site lately you should!

https://www.smashingmagazine.com

https://www.netlify.com/blog/2017/11/21/smashing-magazine-is...

Exactly. Something you can setup for someone computer savvy in marketing to make changes without having to go through an engineer, while preserving all the other good aspects of static sites that you mention

Its actually a "client" CMS cause it runs client side. Now say that you keep your content on GitHub and your site is hosted on GH Pages. You can include this CMS as a library on your site, serve it from GH Pages like the rest of your site and have it communicate with GH to manage your content.

I would say that this is the middle ground between GitHub Pages and full blown proper CMS (e.g., WordPress).

it's not "based on" Node in any way.

> Here’s a quick way to run a server:

you could just as easily run `python -m SimpleHTTPServer 80` and skip installing anything.