eleventy 🕚⚡️ VS decap-cms

This post outlines the steps for migrating an existing BlogCFC blog to a JamStack, with a focus on using Eleventy.

I suggest you to try out eleventhy (https://www.11ty.dev/)

Quite simple to start, and a nice system to add some scripting and styles without the requirement of bringing in a framework.

A production flag enables you to run activities in dev or production such as minifying assets, showing draft posts, etc. There isn't a built-in flag or function that comes with eleventy (11ty) specifically for this. However we have this info at our fingertips.

I can't recommend Eleventy enough!

https://www.11ty.dev

I converted my WordPress blog to Eleventy 4 years ago and never looked back, it's been delightful!

https://www.joshcanhelp.com/taking-wordpress-to-eleventy/

It’s 2024, and you are about to start a new project. Do you reach for React, a framework you know and love or do you look at one of the other hot new frameworks like Astro, Enhance, 11ty, SvelteKit or gasp, plain vanilla Web Components?

The "dev" script is running the eleventy server in dev mode. The details of the script are not important for this discussion, but to round out the background here is an abbreviated version of my package.json:

Eleventy is a fast and powerful SSG that really shines when it comes to pure static site generation because it does not require the loading of a client-side JavaScript bundle in order to serve content.

The irony is using a JavaScript-based static site generator to make the site: https://www.11ty.dev

https://doublejosh.com/post/186193119278/metalsmithjs-is-sti...

Then two years ago I needed a more robust SSR system based on React, so I went with GatsbyJS. It's insanely mature and intuitive, but as we all know that community and business is now drying up too. But the framework is still great.

Now everyone sings the praises of NextJS, which can be used for SSR but is intended for applications and active server endpoints. But more complexity doesn't mean better.

I'm keen to try other simple frameworks when the result is a static site. I may give https://www.11ty.dev a shot.

11ty is a lightweight static site generator. I chopped up my HTML and used the 11ty starter template called eleventy-base-blog as the structural foundation for the site.

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)