decap-cms VS sitepress

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)

I'm currently facing the same problem - adding a blog to a Rails app.

I thought Sitepress looks interesting, as its supposed to integrate with Rails. Have you given that one a try?

https://sitepress.cc/

I’ve been down this path enough times that I built https://sitepress.cc/, which lets you embed content in a rails app with features that are present in Jekyll, Middleman, etc. like Frontmatter, site hierarchy traversal, etc. It keeps content as files in the app/content directory, but when it’s time to pull data in from the Rails app for SEO, it’s all right there in the Rails app. There’s no “Headless CMS” crap to jump through.

For me, this is another way of keeping everything in a monolith, and which requires a lot less context switching. If I’m building a feature and I want to create marketing or support content for it, it’s all right there in the same repo. I just create the markdown files I need, commit them to the repo, and I’m don.

The thought of switching between a static content site or something like Webflow just seems silly. I think they only makes sense for huge teams.

In case you want something like Middleman (frontmatter, static compilation, ...), but embedable in your Rails app, Sitepress is really cool solution (you can even run it without Rails!): https://sitepress.cc

I went the opposite direction and built a static site generator on top of Rails: https://sitepress.cc/

Turns out, Rails is a really good web framework! I tried building Sitepress on something “light weight”, Tilt and Rack, and it was a pain. I found myself constantly solving the same problems that were already solved in Rails. At some point it dawned on me that I could just build on top of a few parts of Rails, so I did. I wrote about it at https://fly.io/ruby-dispatch/single-file-rails-app/

I’m glad I did! Now I can plug all of the Rails template handlers, view components, and other Rails plugins into it and ride off that entire communities docs.

If you find yourself thinking, “rails is too heavy”, consider shedding the parts of Rails that you don’t need. Then as your application grows in complexity and you find yourself needing more parts of Rails, bring it back in.

As I was building Sitepress (a site generator like Middleman, Jekyll, & Bridgetown), I stumbled into the idea that a Rails application can exist in a single file and wrote about it at https://fly.io/ruby-dispatch/single-file-rails-app/.

Agreed. I built https://sitepress.cc/ that uses git + files to manage content in Rails, but it needs an editor.

I’m not sure if the right thing to do is build a web editor or smooth out git workflows so that non-technical people can open content files with desktop software to make changes to the content.

I created https://sitepress.cc/ because you can have both! It can run a dynamic content site from a Rails app or it can compile out pages that can be deployed to any static website host.

It doesn’t have a front end for authoring pages, styles, etc, but that could be built on top of this library.

I was using Middleman for a while, but then grew tired of all the dependencies I had to always keep up-to-date. I did the completely illogical thing and built my own static site generator, https://sitepress.cc/

A few years later and I ended up deleting most of it and replacing the internals with Rails. Now Sitepress is just a tiny rails application sitting on top of a bunch of files. Most of the maintenance and dependencies are handled by major Rails lib maintainers.

When you deploy it, you can compile it into static files and deploy as you’d expect, but you can also deploy it as a rails or rack app … or even embed it into an existing rails app.

When Rails 7.0 gets released I’ll drop JS importmaps into the default install for free and have my dream static site generator that doesn’t have a huge asset compilation step.