ApostropheCMS VS redwood

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.

Frameworks are a theme with this month's Release Radar, so here's another. Redwood is a full-stack, JavaScript/TypeScript web application, designed to scale with you. It uses React frontend for the frontend and links to a custom GraphQL API for the backend. The latest version includes a bunch of breaking changes such as moving to Node 20.0, the Redwood Studio, and highly requested GraphQL features such as Realtime, Fragments, and Trusted Documents, the server file, new router hooks, and heaps more. If you've previously used Redwood, you'll probably want to upgrade to version 7.0. The team have put together a handy migration guide for you to follow.

The other piece of important information to acknowledge here is that when we say RSCs need a framework, “framework” effectively just means “Next.js.” There are some smaller frameworks (like Waku) that support RSCs. There are also some larger and more established frameworks (like Redwood) that have plans to support RSCs or (like Gatsby) only support RSCs in beta. We will likely see this change once we get React 19 and RSCs are part of the Stable version. However, for now, Next.js is currently the only framework recommended in the official React docs that supports server components.

Although there are quite a few opinionated battery-included frameworks that have picked up everything for you like RedwoodJS, Blitz, and Create-T3-App, you still need to choose between them and hope that they will remain mainstream and well-maintained in the future. So how should we choose?

Web development frameworks in JavaScript, such as NextJS and RedwoodJS, have gained popularity among developers. Choosing the right framework, library, or tool for a project is crucial for efficient development. Developers often seek the best tools to save time and avoid reinventing the wheel.

The community here is pretty friendly. https://redwoodjs.com/

Next.js 13 ignited the first wave of attention to React Server Components (RSC) around the end of last year. Over time, other frameworks, like Remix and RedwoodJS, have also started to put RSC into their future road maps. However, the entire "moving computation to the server-side" direction of React/Next.js has been highly controversial from the very beginning.

I'm currently experimenting with the fantastic Redwood framework. However, while going through the excellent tutorial, I didn't find any guidance on using data validation libraries like Yup, Zod, Vest, etc. So, I had to do some investigation and came up with a solution. This article describes the implementation of validation with Zod in a fresh Redwood app. You can find the sources at this github repository.

RBAC is one of the most common authorization models - users are assigned different roles, and resource access privileges are controlled at the role level. Despite its limitations, RBAC is a popular choice for simple applications, and some frameworks (like RedwoodJS) have built-in support for it.

Check it out here: https://redwoodjs.com/