I’m involved with an org that needs to set up a public wishlist for supplies for a project. The rough requirements are as follows:
- Public webpage with a static URL
- Can be easily edited by non-technical people
- Editing requires authentication
- Avoiding corporate services, especially avoiding tracking of both users and admins
- As cheap as reasonably possible
- As quick to set up as possible
Nice to have:
- Hosted under a custom domain
- Supports users “reserving” items so multiple people don’t all supply the same stuff
One option I considered would be running something like wishthis in a VPS under our own domain, but this is kinda expensive, complex, and I don’t trust wishthis’ auth. A different option could be just having a static page in something like Notion or Github pages, which would be free but relies on corporate services we don’t trust.
Is there a middle ground between the two previous options? Or a better solution that fits most of the requirements?
There are several proprietary options (many/most of which you cannot host). Looking for Amazon Wishlist alternatives should help in putting together a list of potential options. Some additional projects which are open source and selfhostable that you could also start with include:
Thank you for the links, I had found a few of these but some are new. The basic idea is there, I’ll see if any of these can work for us. I’m growing more convinced though that hosting a whole app for this super simple use case might not be worth it, I think we might pivot to just hosting a really basic static page for it.
I mean, if you’re unfamiliar, maybe just go with Squarespace? There’s a reason it exists.
It’s pretty overkill for what we need, and it would still fall under “corporate” for us. At that point I could just go for the static Notion page which I can get live in 5m for free.
What about any CMS? GhostWriter or WriteFreely for example.
and I don’t trust wishthis’ auth.
I’m the developer of wishthis. What do you not trust about the auth? I try to be transparent about everything.
Do you have a server, connection and domain available?
If yes, a simple Joomla setup with a single static page should work well.
We can set up all of those but again, that’s kinda expensive for us rn. What’s the benefit of using a CMS like Joomla versus wishthis, or even a basic Caddy/Nginx webserver with a static page?
What is more expensive for your organization: time or money? In general, your options that cost less take more time to setup, and vice versa.
It seems like cheap is more important, so I would roughly do:
- SSG like Hugo or MkDocs
- store the content in S3
- serve with a CDN like Fastly or CloudFront
- authentication via VCL or a Lambda using OAuth
This is way too overkill for what we need. I’m sorry, I’ve been intentionally vague about the context for this but I guess it’s too unclear. We’re an activist group planning a protest. We might have to get this set up literally tomorrow and every penny comes out of (mostly my) pocket. We’re also all paranoid about opsec and anonymity, which is why the requirement about avoiding corporate services is there. Perhaps I should have posted this in a privacy focused comm instead, I apologize.
There’s a free web hosting service called HelioHost that’s completely funded by donations. It’s really really good, especially for being free. It’s not owned by any big companies and all you need is to make an account
