Hosting a public wishlist
Hosting a public wishlist
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:
4Thank 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.
2
What about any CMS? GhostWriter or WriteFreely for example.
2I mean, if you're unfamiliar, maybe just go with Squarespace? There's a reason it exists.
2It'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.
2
Do you have a server, connection and domain available?
If yes, a simple Joomla setup with a single static page should work well.
1We 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?
1What 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
4