Hello, I am gonna go on a bit of rant here, but there does not seem to be too much good options for Headless CMS for the developer/blogger which ha...
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We've recently launched Flotiq and its free tier should be just enough for a typical blogger.
We're building the Flotiq blog using Flotiq, so we surely share any pains any other user will have ;-). And a more immersive text editing feature is high on our priority list :-)
Here's a teaser video to get you started:
Take a look and let me know how we can make it better for you. Drop us an email at hello at flotiq.com
That is awesome great to hear and thank you for sharing. Just wondering why are you using Heroku with Gatsby when that is a bit of overkill for a static site generator?
I also tend to stay away from Heroku because scaling a web app on it can get extremely pricey and the fact that your app is asleep on free tier.
Heroku is just an example of how you can host a site generated with Gatsby. For our blog we're actually using Cloudflare workers, it costs $5 a month but gives us a lot more than just hosting.
"I need to rebuild the site every single time I publish a new article. So if there is a small spelling mistake, then another rebuild. That eats up a ton of build minutes on Netlify."
To solve the issue, You can use dynamic sites like pages that are created via React Router with respect to URL.
Gatsby creates static pages default. You can do something. gatsbyjs.org/tutorial/part-seven/
For example, this is dynamic content blog, created with React and Prismic io.( Contentful or another CMS can be used ) user-guides.prismic.io/en/articles...
The issue with that I believe is that now you lose all the benefits like SEO and speed from static site generation. For example, The content text is no longer rendered when I inspect view page source.
view-source:react-blog-demo.netlify.com/blog/p...
We use Prismic at work. It's built to be very flexible which is nice. Most of the problems I've had with headless have to do with the "head." Like it sounds like the Gatsby build thing is a limitation for you. I have a couple of Gatsby site and I wish the build time was faster. Also making the preview in a headless CMS look like the "head" requires a lot of work in my general experience.
I wonder if Gatsby could be configured to read a feed of posts so you wouldn't need to rebuild? I'm experimenting with this a bit myself. I have a prototype that grabs an RSS file on load and uses that as the posts.
I'm currently using Kontent as my preferred CMS. I think it checks a lot of your boxes:
The rebuilding process is almost inevitable when publishing to a static/CDN environment, and is also one of the unique selling points for JAMstack sites. Since the site is already being prebuilt, your website will become a lot faster.
Hi Martin, Kontent looks pretty good from the surface reading the specs and the pricing tiers. I will have to try it out and look into it a bit more. Thank you for the suggestion.
Are you able to custom style the fields in the editor. For example, if I wanted all the H1 tags to look a certain way with a specific hover effect. Did with Bold, Italic, Underline,etc. Actually I do not see underline in the screenshot given, hopefully that is there though. I am also guessing it does not have a live preview option?
I am going to give Butter CMS a go, it has a very good rating and might post my findings later on.
I understand that is a huge selling point for JAMStack, but it would be nice if at least a live preview was available on how the article looks when you are creating it. This would speed up publishing time dramatically and reduce unnecessarily rebuilds. A marketer/ blogger on the company site can easily customize and preview the article they are writing without having to publish, wait for the site to rebuild etc. It is almost a disaster doing it this way
There are some interesting things happening with live previews at StackBit, however, they are still in beta. Not ready yet for use in production environments in my opinion. But it could be a killer functionality!
You can check Best Headless Platforms for Blogging article that reviews an in-depth analysis of headless blogging platforms.
Recently switched from Contentful to Butter and wow, what a difference! Everything that was a pain is now smooth sailing. Can't believe I did not switch sooner! Unfortunately still have some sites on Contentful but migrating my blog over to Butter CMS. Thanks for the suggestions everyone!
Are you still using Butter? Any issues with it?
Hmm there is a lot of business incentive. I am not saying it should be 100% free, there is different tiers. A free tier and a paid tier when your blog say hits 10,000 views a month or after you have created 5000+ articles.
Pretty much any tech business does this. I don't think the existing CMS platforms out there are trying to create crappy CMS platforms because people are not willing to pay for great features. I am quite certain large companies would pay large sums of money for a CMS that was great for both the developer and writer and had the features outlined above.
ghost.org/ has an awesome writing interface, and is free to host yourself. strapi.io/ is super customizable and easy to deploy. But if your using netlify to build have you thought of using netlifycms.org/ ?
Hi Nicholas, thanks for your suggestion. I have tried both. Netlify CMS is pretty limited from what I seen.
I didn't see anyone mention Sanity.io yet, so thought I'd add that in as a suggestion. What I like about Sanity is that you can create whatever schema you want, which you host yourself or just run locally, but the data is in a lake on Sanity's servers.
Could be overkill for a simpler blog, but I use it for guides and a magazine section. I love it, so well worth a mention.
Naive question, but what's wrong with just GitHub + Visual Studio Code with live preview of your markdown files?
The biggest issue with that is content management. This might be okay if you are just one person on a personal blog, but if you are working with marketing people or content writer you probably do not want them in messing with the code inside VS Code Editor.
The other reason is you want to make things consistent as possible, but still have that flexibility to make certain customizations. With a content management system, you can ensure that each article has a title, author, image, subtitle, etc and looks a "certain way"
A good content management system and editor, should make the writing process streamlined (ie. easily check for spelling mistakes and format your articles easily and nicely, detached from the code) and create some architecture and consistency with your content.
Hope that makes sense. That is my interpretation at least.
Yup that makes sense, thanks!
You all might find this useful. An interview with a lead developer for one of the newer SaaS headless CMS offerings: resources.fabric.inc/blog/headless...
I can very much relate.
What do you think of using Notion or Ghost as a headless CMS?
I Used Strapi and I really love it the only problem I had with it is deployment but except that everything is powerful easy and simple