notion-to-md VS jekyllplus

This is very cool! I recently started managing my Astro site content with Notion as a CMS, thanks to `notion-to-md` [1] and `@notionhq/client` [2] but media management is a hassle.

I had been planning to re-host Notion media files to Cloudflare R2 and rewrite content, but it might just be simpler to use Pages CMS due to built-in R2 support.

But also, I like using Notion apps on the go. Hmm.

[1] https://github.com/souvikinator/notion-to-md

I’ve never used it, but there’s a Notion to Markdown converter on GitHub: https://github.com/souvikinator/notion-to-md

Notion works with content blocks. Each paragraph and each formatted section is a block on its own. Fetching that from Notion gets me a load of nested objects that are cumbersome to work with. I'm using NotionToMarkdown to take care of that. This will give me a markdown string from a Notion page that's easy to work with. Beware it’s just a markdown string, though. Using it in a template will output the unrendered string. But if we put that into a markdown file, from which eleventy will generate pages, it will also render the markdown string to HTML.

One can add custom parsing logic for specific blocks. More details here

Thanks to everyone for using notion-to-md and actively contributing and reporting issues. It has now 200+ stars on GitHub and 1000+ weekly downloads on NPM.

Haven’t done that myself, but I do know there’s a Notion to markdown converter that seems like it might be worth checking out.

Github: https://github.com/souvikinator/notion-to-md

In a nutshell:

1. You log in with your GitHub account.

2. You select the GitHub repo where your site/app is at (whether it's Next.js, 11ty, Hugo, Nuxt... as long as you're using flat files for content).

3. You add a single config file to your repo to define the content types and other settings (e.g. media folder).

4. Congrats: you now have a user friendly CMS to manage content + media BUT all changes are still tracked like regular commits (under your account) on GitHub.

I started using Jekyll around 2009 and over the course of the past 10+ years, I've helped build major sites and tiny blogs with Hugo, Gatsby, Next.js and more recently 11ty.

I still love it.

BUT once you're done building, managing content and media can be a bit of a pain. You have a few options:

- Edit files directly (on GitHub or your local). Good luck getting your colleagues on the marketing team to do that.

- Hook up a headless CMS like Contentful, Sanity, or Strapi. That works, but it's one more dependency and (IMHO) overkill in most cases.

- OR you could use something like [Decap CMS](https://decapcms.org/). Really cool project, but I've never been a fan of the UI/UX, and it's been a bit of a pain to setup (maybe that's just me).

I wanted something as simple as possible, preferably with nothing to install or deploy.

Back in 2018, I had built a prototype (Jekyll+) [1] with the idea of getting a CMS set up by just adding a single configuration file to your GitHub repository.

Pages CMS [2] is a continuation of that idea. It's 100% free and Open Source: https://github.com/pages-cms/pages-cms.

If you don't want to use the online version because you're not comfortable signing up with your GitHub account, consider the following options:

- Use a fine-grained personal access token [3], there's an option on the login screen. There is still a bug if you try to access a repo that isn't part of your token scope, but I'll get it fixed in the next couple of days.

- Deploy it yourself (for free) on Cloudflare Pages. Literally 5 minutes of work max. I made a video walking you through the process [4].

- Check out the intro video on the front page [2] (a bit crap, but I'll get a better one up in the next few days).

I use it actively with a few other teams, I hope it will be of use to some of you.

I'm already working on adding a few nicer features, like collaborative editing and email invites (to let non-developers login without a GitHub account).

PS: I've spent the past 8+ years building a business and only recently got back into coding. I'd love pointers as to what I could do better (and how I can manage my Powerpoint PTSD).

[1]: https://github.com/hunvreus/jekyllplus/

[2]: https://pagescms.org

[3]: https://docs.github.com/en/authentication/keeping-your-accou...

[4]: https://pagescms.org/docs/development/