With technical writing becoming increasingly popular - thanks in part to platforms like DEV or Hashnode, I found it interesting that the tooling in...
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Lovely tool. I already coded a branch to migrate my blog to use it. My only concern before deploying this branch using Vrite is about the pricing methodology.
Did not see anything about this, which makes me a bit concerned about adopting it for now.
What's the costs? I see features like data storage, image uploading, HTTP requests, etc that surely cost something for you. So, where we add our CC to pay for it?
Although I love the enthusiasm, be warned that it's still in development - which is why bugs might occur and I haven't yet build a proper support for content imports/migrations as I plan to.
That's also why there's no payments built-in. I don't feel comfortable charging for something that might be buggy or unstable. Of course, the hosted version will have to cost something eventually and will play a huge part in making the development sustainable.
For now, for development purposes, I can manage the demand and pay the bills. Once we get to a stable version, I hope to create a pricing structure that will be reasonable and competitive with similar tools out there. If you will feel otherwise, there will be an option of self-hosting, with easy migration back and forth.
Awesome! That's the answer I was looking for. Hopefully it will not be expensive for me to support, since it will be for sure the tool I will use from now, so I will love to pay to support its development and growth ☺️
In any case, the self-hosted is a great alternative. The place I work today use this same exact business model, so I highly recommend you to go for it 👏
Really neat program for writing. I'm looking forward to exploring it more.
Thanks, glad you like it!
This looks rad! What would you say are the key advantages from a product perspective over Contentful? (Already loving that it's open source and that it's primarily Markdown-based!)
First off, it's definitely focused on a different audience, i.e. developers and technical writers. This is already visible with the built-in code editor and Prettier integration and I plan to build on that.
Secondly, I'm going for a simple, modern UI/UX. I feel like Contentful tries to do the same, but I did feel a bit lost when exploring their platform. With proper docs, I hope this won't be the case with Vrite - and that it'll scale with no matter how many features.
Lastly, I might be wrong but I think Vrite is pretty unique kind of CMS. Not only is it dev-focused, but also has:
All that in an open-source, soon-to-be self-hostable shell. There are more things to come that I feel will make it more special but that's pretty much it for now. Hope this answers your question.
I have been hoping for something like this, this looks awesome!
Thanks, more great stuff coming soon!
Nice tool, but first attempts to try the editor are strange. Did I do something wrong?
Compared to tools like TipTap or even the built-In dev-Editor, editing seems to be fairly complicated and limiting???
I don't think the comparison is the best one. DEV supports many options but doesn't provide a WYSIWYG experience, while TipTap is Justa framework to build on (one that Vrite is based on BTW). I usually look at Notion, Dropbox Paper or StackEdit (editor-wise). Vrite is still not fully-featured as those, but it’s getting there. The goal would be to support full GFM, with a few reasonable extensions (like embeds) to provide best experience for programming content and documentation writing in the future. Once this is achieved a “raw Markdown” view could also be added with all the input options (like in DEV but with e.g. syntax highlighting).
If you’re interested to see what you’re looking for prioritized, definitely open an issue or start a discussion on GitHub: github.com/vriteio/vrite/discussions
As mentioned, I really like the concept. But editing is currently limited to things you can do with every basic markdown. What kind of "technical content" do you think can be presented with super and subscript only?
Presenting content without any advanced formatting was the initial approach of HTML, wich included about the same options that the vrite editor provides. So, we already know this was not enough.
I'm not sure we're thinking about the same regarding the concept and idea for Vrite.
Basically, my intention is to create a headless CMS that provides good UI/UX for everything related to technical (programming-related to be specific) content (including writing and management).
From my experience, most often, documentation, blogging platforms, personal blogs, etc. are based heavily on Markdown with various extensions. So, the initial goal is to support the most popular specification - GFM.
Now, the editor isn't something people are meant to see. It's what you interact with when writing. After that you can access the content in JSON format mentioned in the post, and adjust it to your needs, converting it to Markdown, HTML, etc. as required.
For vast majority of target use-cases I think GFM with embeds is more than enough. This ensures that anything you create in Vrite can be adapted to most frontends easily, whether that's a blog, DEV, Hashnode, etc.
Given that Vrite is a headless CMS, I don't control where you publish content and how it's viewed. Thus, providing all kind of formatting options beyond GFM or popular extensions like embeds, LaTeX, etc. doesn't make much sense in my opinion. For example, Notion is one of my favorite tools and was an inspiration behind the editor. However, supporting all the content blocks or formatting options it provides doesn't make sense for a headless CMS, as the effort on the user side, to actually display those properly would be just too much. So, having too many options out-of-the-box, that require effort from the user to implement and display properly I think is confusing and thus a no-go.
Now, with all that said, GFM and some embeds will be the core of what the editor supports. However, I'm down for supporting other options with time - not built-in but through some kind of customisation. I haven't yet though about how exactly will this look, but it'd best if you could add the formatting options or content blocks you need, using the JSON format underneath, while providing a rendering mechanism for Vrite editor to display them while writing, and handle them accordingly on your frontend.
On the other hand, if Vrite ever goes beyond the "headless" part, then there's certainly a possibility to support much larger variety of options. However, to still maintain compatibility with other platforms and endpoints it'd be best implemented in a layer of customization, just like described above.
Hope this answers your doubts and hopefully clarifies what Vrite intends to achieve.
I love the idea of this tool. Blog content management, especially if cross-posting from say a personal site to dev.to (or platform of your choice) can get complicated very quickly. I find I spend more time jumping across sites to try and post and manage than I do creating content.
Thanks for making and sharing this, I am going to try it out as I really want to be posting more long-form content again without the overhead of data management.
I think the goal of self hosting is a good one, especially for a developer like me who often has a server/CMS or two laying around the room as a cloud backup.
Great work, looking forward to seeing this mature.
Thanks for kind words. I experienced something similar (both when writing on my personal blog and when working in larger content teams) while also not being satisfied with the features WYSIWYG editors provided for technical writing. Happy to have you on-board with the idea and hope you'll stay along for the ride!
I really like the idea and was already thinking to build something like this myself. Is there also some way of publishing to your own website via an SDK or is that maybe in planning? 😊
Certainly! You can adjust the mechanism in this post to your website, i.e. change how the Webhook publishes the content and how Content Transformers adjust it.
Right now the SDK also has a dedicated integration for Astro. Example usage can be found on the landing page for Vrite. Astro is pretty great so definitely check it and the integration out if you're interested.
Other than that I'm definitely look to make the publishing process easier (perhabs through an integration/extension system) and write more guides for popular platforms and tools. Will need more time for this though. 😉
P.S. Just read that you mention Astro in your bio, so I might be onto something 😂
Haha you are perfectly right!
I happen to also use Astro for my portfolio page, so it's the perfect fit! ✨
I am just testing your product and the code editor is the breeze. Code Formatting and commenting in the editor is a great feature!
Really looking forward to using this tool! 🥳
I have to say, I'm quite impressed with your choice to incorporate a kanban board into the writing process, I would very much benefit from that!
Glad to hear that! It's based on my past experiences as I've often seen Trello or similar tool used to manage content production in larger teams. It's great for technical blogs and marketing content but I also hope to make it more versatile for use-cases like documentation or help centers, in the future.