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Ask HN: Looking for headless CMS recommendation

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Re: Ask HN: Looking for headless CMS recommendation

#51

Post by citizenpaul »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #23
citizenpaul wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand I worked for a small place that was spending over 250k'ish per year on website maintenance to a company that setup their headless CMS website that they sold them. They complained about it constantly but they kept paying (7 years and going when I was doing work for them which by they way they constantly tried to shortchange me). Never feel bad about taking money from a company, its just business. Set…

> Not to mention if you invoke those companies you are putting yourself in their walled garden that makes them money and takes control of your income away from you. Why would any person want to do that? There is no moral quandary here. Buying into proprietary software and walled gardens is ridiculously common and acceptable in a business environment. That's code for "no liability if something goes wrong, minimal main…

>common and acceptable in a business environment

Duh.

The comment context was in response to selling something to a company as a service. If you are just being an unofficial middle man between a SaaS and your customer you are going to make very little money. Its essentially uber for tech, you are going to be bearing the burden of all the implementation friction. On top of that you are acting as an uncommissioned sales person for the SaaS while they collect income indefinitely from your work.

The difference in how you setup the deal is literally millions of dollars in the real life example I mentioned. I don't care about corporations. I want HN posters to make money for their work and skills rather than be used and tossed in the trash by corporations. Guess what? The company is still in business and doing fine. The owner just gets one less lambo per year and a developer gets to feed their family.

Its also worth mentioning the obvious only reason they still pay the small consultancy is that they are constantly asking for changes and new things. Why would you want the extra overhead of working in someone elses sandbox when you have to do all the work anyway. Might as well be on your terms if you are going to do the work.

Re: Ask HN: Looking for headless CMS recommendation

#52

Post by mikae1 »

h4ch1 wrote: post #49
mikae1 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Too bad it doesn't quite support dates in the dir paths. I'd like to recommend a highly underappreciated single binary rewrite of Jekyll in Go: https://github.com/osteele/gojekyll

Hmm, personally I never really cared for dated paths, seems like a problem that's solved by metadata defined in the frontmatter. my-blog-article-title.md seems enough, and dates usually feel like clutter, since titles are distinct as they are and you don't really need the date in the filename to do anything useful. But again, different people prefer different setups.

> my-blog-article-title.md seems enough, and dates usually feel like clutter, since titles are distinct as they are and you don't really need the date in the filename to do anything useful.

I love to see when a page by posted just by looking at the URL. It also avoids naming collisions. For a static site, not rendered from a db, I wouldn't want to store every post ever written in one dir either. How well does that scale? Yeah, you can probably store 100K files in dir, but it will become unwieldy and slow to load when browsing a lot sooner. Just a dir per year probably solve any such problem.

Re: Ask HN: Looking for headless CMS recommendation

#53

Post by pembrook »

skeptrune wrote: post #37
pembrook wrote: post #7

I wouldn't be setting up a static site + headless CMS for a non-technical organization. This is basically asking for a constant headache. Just set them up on a website builder like Webflow/Framer/Ycode/Squarespace/etc that has a CMS built in.

If there's a no-code way to edit content and AI can work with the rest then I think it's fine.

AI isn't going to be much help unless the customer is comfortable vibe coding in cursor and isn't too intimidated by a git/serverless workflow...but firing up an IDE like cursor and dealing with git + serverless builds is still a huuugge ask for most people who aren't in tech by trade.

Even AI assisted it's going to be rough.

It's important to remember a vast majority of people have never used their desktop computer for more than MS Office and Google Chrome (facebook/youtube) and maybe ChatGPT now (still only 34% of the US population).

Heck, dealing with a file system is already too much complexity for most of the population.

Navigating around some enterprise-y headless CMS UI is already going to be a big ask. If these volunteers are anything like the ones I've dealt with before, they're going to struggle to even get past basic auth (which email did I use? What's my password again? What the hells a password manager???)

Re: Ask HN: Looking for headless CMS recommendation

#55

Post by falibout »

steviedotboston wrote: post #41

Drupal works very well as a headless CMS now https://www.drupal.org/docs/develop/decoupled-drupal https://www.lullabot.com/resource/decoupled-drupal Drupal has a really strong community behind it, and was completely rebuilt a number of years ago with modern PHP. It uses Symfony, composer, etc.

Can confirm. I had written off Drupal over a decade ago but it's evolved into something rock solid and infinitely customizable for any kind of website. Works well headless and none of the paid plugin nonsense that Wordpress suffers from. I still use Wordpress headless for most client work but Drupal was a very pleasant surprise.

Re: Ask HN: Looking for headless CMS recommendation

#57

Post by dabockster »

dizlexic wrote: post #46
geocrasher wrote: post #42

The answer isn't headless WordPress. It's WordPress. You're building something for a volunteer community, which means at some point you'll be gone and somebody will be wondering how the heck to manage the site with this "custom" setup that they can't figure out with chatgpt or a youtube video. Set them up for the future, not for the now. WordPress. Just WordPress. Reference: 26+ years in hosting, 4 years in WordPress…

I hate to agree because I hate WordPress, but when building something for others especially in a volunteer community it's still the go-to solution. Pros, a ton of docs, easy non-technical customization, long term support, many already experienced users, made for basically exactly what you're doing. Cons, it's WordPress, and the actual wp-loop is a nightmare of bad choices.

Same. Or maybe something using PHP just as a basic templating engine (like how people used to use it). Something that can be copy/pasted to a dime a dozen cPanel powered shared webhost at a moment's notice.

Re: Ask HN: Looking for headless CMS recommendation

#58

Post by type0 »

geocrasher wrote: post #42

The answer isn't headless WordPress. It's WordPress. You're building something for a volunteer community, which means at some point you'll be gone and somebody will be wondering how the heck to manage the site with this "custom" setup that they can't figure out with chatgpt or a youtube video. Set them up for the future, not for the now. WordPress. Just WordPress. Reference: 26+ years in hosting, 4 years in WordPress…

Why not Ghost instead?

Re: Ask HN: Looking for headless CMS recommendation

#59

Post by michaelsalim »

type0 wrote: post #58
geocrasher wrote: post #42

The answer isn't headless WordPress. It's WordPress. You're building something for a volunteer community, which means at some point you'll be gone and somebody will be wondering how the heck to manage the site with this "custom" setup that they can't figure out with chatgpt or a youtube video. Set them up for the future, not for the now. WordPress. Just WordPress. Reference: 26+ years in hosting, 4 years in WordPress…

Why not Ghost instead?

Most people don't know Ghost. Almost everyone knows wordpress
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