penmark VS cms

I've been trying to build a tool that solves that niche problemset of facilitating the edit flow of a dev blog.

I liked Forestry, but wanted something that was embedded directly into my website, so I built Penmark CMS https://penmark.appsinprogress.com/. Inspired by utteranc.es, it uses the GitHub API to make edits directly to your repo. It's definitely a simple CMS but I'm liking it to write for my own blog!

Hi HN,

I've always found editing my blog via desktop editors to be inconvenient, especially when it came to keeping the repository in sync and trying to edit on the go, and relying on an external CMS or tools like the now-discontinued Forestry.io was complex to setup for simple cases and spread my website & workflow over multiple different apps. Around the same time, I discovered utterances [1] on here, a comments widget backed by GitHub for your website. Inspired by that project, I decided to build Penmark.

Penmark is an embeddable CMS for your Markdown-based, GitHub-backed sites. Penmark can be embedded directly into your website, allowing you to access a rich text CMS editing experience without external tools, and while keeping all your site's content in your repository.

It's simple to setup, embed the 3 components (Login, Drafts, Edit Post) that create the CMS experience within your site and add the GitHub app to your repository.

Once you've set it up on your site/repo, you can edit directly from your site, on the go and from any device, and let Penmark take care of all the operations needed to keep your site and repository in sync.

If you want to check it out, the code is open source on GitHub https://github.com/penmark-cms/penmark and I made a docs site to explain how to add it https://penmark.appsinprogress.com/

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29189923

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.