ApostropheCMS VS decap-cms

If you are not familiar with that technology, ApostropheCMS is an open-source website builder and CMS developed with modern technologies such as Vue.js and Node.js. It enables editors to effortlessly create and manage content through an intuitive UI, while developers have the ability to customize the admin UI by overriding existing Vue.js components and extending it with new menus and field types. At the same time, you keep the ability to use your technologies of choice on the front end. Learn more in the documentation.

Apostrophe's CTO, Tom Boutell, recently presented a talk at Philly Tech Week to share his experience using the OpenAI API to integrate AI into Apostrophe. If you are not familiar with this tool, Apostrophe is an open-source CMS built on modern technologies like Node.js and Vue.js that can operate as a traditional CMS, headless CMS, and website builder.

ApostropheCMS allows multiple content contributors and editors to work on documents across multiple sites. Keeping track of when changes were made to a document and who made those changes is critical. The enterprise edition of ApostropheCMS has an important new tool for managing the content pipeline. The Document Versions tool facilitates the use and management of multiple versions of a document (page).

Integrate your technology, including Express, MongoDB, npm, Vue.js, and Node.js, with flexible and native modules content APIs. In addition, Apostrophe provides a single dashboard for every operation so that you will never lack in searching for the perfect tool for your websites. You can also integrate with Jamstack to create robust custom solutions. Currently, it has 3.9k stars on GitHub.

As someone who dabbled in PHP but is mostly a self-taught JS hobbyist dev, I have been using and loving Directus (https://directus.io) since around the time they switched to Node. Development velocity is exceptional with new features released every couple of weeks and bugfixes/enhancements even more frequent, the community and core team is fantastic, and I like the fact that if I ever decide to switch to another CMS for some reason, there's no real import/export process, I just delete the directus_tables in my database, and done.

Pocketbase (https://pocketbase.io/) piqued my interest after seeing it here and on ProductHunt, but I don't think it would be the right call for a client before it hits a stable release.

I also very much enjoyed OctoberCMS (although it has its quirks), but there was a fairly acrimonious split in the community there, and OctoberCMS is no longer open source, and I haven't used the fork (WinterCMS: https://wintercms.com/)

I enjoyed using Apostrophe (https://apostrophecms.com/) for a while, but ultimately I felt like I was doing a lot of stuff in a way that didn't come naturally to me, and although Mongo seems a logical choice when you look at Apostrophe's page model, it worried me a bit that the data would not be easy to move if I ever wanted to.

Check https://apostrophecms.com/.

In this most recent release, in addition to batch operations, and the import / export modules, we have also rolled out an update to the open-graph module for A3, as well as shared additions, fixes, and changes. These updates, and all product related notes can be found on Github Discussions. To see all that is currently in the works or planned for Apostrophe, check out our product roadmap.

Following one of the comments in this thread I reviewed two other products in this space - https://www.staticcms.org/ and https://decapcms.org/ - and it looks like the webpages are almost a direct copy of one another, one in dark mode and one in light mode.

I'm a technical product marketer, and I find these type of landing page copying amusing to no end.

Decap CMS, formerly Netlify CMS, is an extensible headless CMS built as a single-page React app. It’s an open source and completely free-to-use option that offers rich-text editing, real-time preview, and drag-and-drop media uploads.

You can look into a Git-based CMS, such as https://github.com/decaporg/decap-cms

These typically are designed to support static site generators.

I found https://decapcms.org/ which seems like an easy to use.

Did you consider https://decapcms.org/ (previously Netlify CMS)? I'm surprised it never really caught on as it seems a good fit for most small Markdown based sites. Looks like Smashing Magazine was using it before they moved to Tina CMS (https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2020/01/migration-from-word...).

Products like [decap CMS](https://github.com/decaporg/decap-cms) try to bridge that gap, but I agree that this space needs to be further developed. In fact I think there needs to be a bunch more work to allow mere mortals to use version control and branch workflows in day to day work.

I've thought of something similar! A git-based flow for a friend's static portfolio site, where he can make text edits and upload images, and the site builds that content with HTML templates.

Not sure how the GitHub markdown editor would feel for the user. It might be really great, even for uploading images.

I was imagining a static admin page, WYSIWYG, that makes git pushes on submit. These were the headless CMSs that seem to be able to accomplish that:

https://www.siteleaf.com/

https://decapcms.org/

And not git based, but similar idea: https://editable.website/

And this is what the admin edit page usually looks like: https://quick-edit-demo.vercel.app/admin/index.html#/collect...

But was taking a bit of work to configure.

Since I made my post, I've also discovered Decap CMS. This looks fairly close to what I was looking for - it deploys as a static SPA alongside the site on a /admin route, allows login with Github (and several other platforms), and builds the site using a choice of static site generator like Gatsby/Hugo/Jekyll etc. The templates are relatively rigid by default though - page layouts are defined up front, and to add a page with a different layout you need to manually add some files to the repo. It seems like there's a way to work around this and add flexibility, but it needs a bit of custom React development. It seems like this might be worth the time investment for me though, since it's the closest thing I've found to what I need so far.

If you've got the content in .md and .json files and you just need a way to add or modify that content, I would recommend you look into decap CMS (formerly netlify CMS)