Looking for a headless CMS for a personal/blog site as well as a way to give a bit of control to any clients that I hand a content-heavy site off to. Free and paid software are both an option. I am wondering if anyone has experience already with one that they’ve integrated with redwood, or if they have any on some sites that they personally reach for whenever the opportunity arises?
I recently heard about butterCMS on the JSJabber podcast earlier this week, but other than that I am clueless, so any direction is better than none!
I almost went down this rabbit hole myself a few months ago and found it very difficult just to get a straightforward comparison between the different options. I never ended up building anything but a lot of the research stuck in my head.
I quickly realized the question was hard cause when you ask the question “What CMS should I use,” a huge chunk of the responses you get just happen to be from developer advocates working at CMS companies. Crazy coincidence, right?
I eventually got a chance to ask a long time Jamstack community member about this and they broke it down for me in a way that’s stuck in my brain ever since, obviously this is a highly opinionated take:
This leads to three main questions you need to consider:
Are you looking for something stable or cutting edge?
Are you looking for no code, low code, or only code?
Do you already have content and if so what form is it and how hard would it be to move?
I think out of those five any would be a safe bet at this point and you could make awesome stuff with all of them. But a couple more I’d also consider would be:
Ghost just organically seems to have massive support behind it, is beginner friendly, and is still growing and adding features.
Directus if you have an existing SQL database and you want to wrap it with a realtime GraphQL or REST API
Ponzu if you need lots of encryption support built in
I’ve been using (and company paying for) since late 2016.
What set it apart back in 2017ish and why we started paying, was fine grained team and role-based editing support as the content team grew (aka lots of interns) and only certain content models were allowed to be added edited and (rarely) deleted/archived.
Wow! I went from having nothing to having a few hours worth of research to do, I have to work on deploying my current project, but I’ll be sure to post my blog with whatever CMS I decide on over in the appropriate section! Thanks for the breakdown everyone
Thinking out loud here --> is there a scenario where it might make sense to connect to a Headless CMS via Redwood’s API? I naturally want to try and leverage the API where it makes sense, 'cause Cells(!), so I started mentally mapping out how something like that could/would work. But then I realized the whole point of a Headless CMS is not handling CRUD in your app, so no need.
It looks like this is what happened with @AryanJ-NYC when he did an experiment connecting to Sanity.io. I’m very curious about the Prisma parts and how they worked. And/or maybe he has a great idea to add support for Cells to be configured for other (additional) GraphQL endpoints.
Redwood Cells + Prerender support + Headless CMS == FTW (for a lot of people I think)
So I tried all those CMS in the last few days and it was always a balance between reinventing the wheel and having multiple wheels that don’t fit.
Strapi looked the most promising but wouldn’t fit seamlessly as it is not using prisma and because of some random webpack shenanigans.
I think the best solution is to use Amplication for the backend, especially with Suprabase it works great. If you change the generator templates to fit amplication naming schema it work pretty mutch out of the box plus has also swagger support.
And for frontend mantine seems to be a quite good choice. Nocodb looks also quite promising, but haven’t tried it yet.
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