decap-cms VS cms

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)

Statamic is one of the best flat-file CMSs. It’s built with Laravel and can be used as a headless Git-based CMS as well. The paid professional version allows you to use REST APIs and GraphQL APIs for content management and offers a GitHub integration for content storage and editorial workflows.

Aah, that's always a controversial question, on one hand, some universal rules of usability do exist, but on the other hand, everyone's habits, taste and use cases are very different.

The most neutral definition of a "well designed" website, without any further context, could be "created in a way that helps users achieve intended goals efficiently, while keeping max number of users happy about its look".

Again, different audiences will have very different answers. Here at HN, sites like https://www.mcmaster.com/ and https://www.craigslist.org win – because HN users appreciate old look and how efficient these sites are.

https://www.apple.com/ is an industry standard of a marketing site for consumer tech. It's not universally "well designed".

Other examples of well done marketing pages: https://www.sketch.com/ ; https://statamic.com/ ; https://linear.app/ got its share of hype recently.

Other times, a website is well designed because its content is awesome and is easy to consume. See https://ciechanow.ski/ and https://www.joshwcomeau.com/

Is https://github.com/ well designed? As an amateur developers, I'd say yes.

Is https://htmx.org/ well designed? Hmm, at a glance, there's no design at all. Is no design also design? That's a rabbit hole.

P.S. I often hear my website is well-designed :-)

Local CMSs are the ones that are mostly file-based (like Statamic or Astro). This means that you can edit everything locally and deploy the data. This way, our CMS is more secure, but on the downside, you have to have a local server working, and you might experience more conflicts, especially when two people will work on the same article (although Git might save you from many of those). It also means that there is a higher learning curve. A remote CMS works somewhere on a server, and most users don't care how.

I use Statamic, the free version will do everything your looking for and it can be as simple or as complex as you need it to be. It's flat file based (by default) too so deployment / version control is super easy.

Statamic (PHP / Laravel)

I'm not in the market for a CMS but if I were I'd likely go with https://statamic.com/ if I needed to build something from scratch.

If you're looking for a great CMS and were bitten by WordPress back in the day, you should take a look at Statamic (https://statamic.com)

It's a Laravel package and it's the best CMS I've ever used (from a dev perspective). v4 just dropped the other day

https://statamic.com free for personal. Your welcome.