temporal_tables VS decap-cms

It was reimplemented in pure SQL here https://github.com/nearform/temporal_tables for this purpose

I enjoyed this blog. I think it provides a great succinct overview of various approaches native to Postgres.

For the "capture changes in an audit table" section, I've had good experiences at a previous company with the Temporal Tables pattern. Unlike other major RDBMS vendors, it's not built into Postgres itself, but there's a simple pattern [1] you can leverage with a SQL function.

This allows you to see a table's state as of a specific point in time. Some sample use cases:

- "What was this user's configuration on Aug 12?"

- "How many records were unprocessed at 11:55pm last night?"

- "Show me the diff on feature flags between now and a week ago"

[1]: https://github.com/nearform/temporal_tables

One of these Postgres-based implementations of SQL:2011's temporal versioning features might get you close enough:

- https://github.com/nearform/temporal_tables

You don't really need to install an extension to use temporal tables, there is an alternative (https://github.com/nearform/temporal_tables) implemented purely as a plpgsql trigger so that it works everywhere.

I was part of a team at NearForm using this for a project on an EC2 instance. In order to move to AWS RDS we had to recreate the functionality of temporal_tables as a PostgreSQL function, rather than extension.

When we switched, we found that although there were minor bugs, we didn't have any noticeable loss of performance and we have used it ever since for many projects.

https://github.com/nearform/temporal_tables

If you're also limited by cloud services and the extensions limitations, this is a great solution.

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)