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Ask HN: Looking for headless CMS recommendation

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Re: Ask HN: Looking for headless CMS recommendation

#81

Post by geocrasher »

dabockster wrote: post #57
dizlexic wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For better or worse, you just described WordPress.

Re: Ask HN: Looking for headless CMS recommendation

#82

Post by SenHeng »

farseer wrote: post #78
justinrubek wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, wordpress is very confusing for non-technical people to navigate. It is largely not different than a "custom" setup because it's always some patched together job of various plugins to the point that it becomes brittle and difficult to work with. I get the sense that technical people think it is more straightforward and prescribe it to people, but any non-technical person I've worked with is utterly…

Its just a website to post community events, don't think any plugins would be required.

My wife downloads plugins for every little thing. One to hide hide the title from a page, another to display a gallery of images. Often she’ll forget and download a similar one again and they all break.

Also instead of making multiple posts, she edits the same post over and over again, adding content to it.

That’s how she was taught to use Wordpress at her old job and no amount of explaining or demonstrating will make her change her ways.

Re: Ask HN: Looking for headless CMS recommendation

#84

Post by solardev »

I work for a headless CMS, but I think that's a poor fit for your use case. Many of our small customers start off in your situation, where a helpful dev makes them a headless site. A couple years later, the dev moves on, and the client has no way to update their site with new features or sections, and no way to fix it if anything breaks. And we have to explain to them what headless is and why they're in this situation. It sucks for everyone involved.

Go with a regular CMS, like Wix or Squarespace or WordPress. The $10 or $20 a month is still cheaper than having to pay a dev later to fix their broken headless site with old deprecated packages and frameworks that nobody uses anymore.

Headless is a developer optimization, not a client feature. It only makes sense if the dev is a part of the customer's own team, or in an ongoing agency relationship with them. It's a poor fit for freelancers and volunteers because the client ends up with essentially abandonware.

Re: Ask HN: Looking for headless CMS recommendation

#85

Post by curioussquirrel »

If you're hell-bent on headless, I can personally recommend 11ty (https://www.11ty.dev/) and hugo (https://gohugo.io/). That said, for non-technical admins, you probably want a user interface. For that, Ghost (https://ghost.org/) and Grav (https://getgrav.org/). Or Wordpress!

Re: Ask HN: Looking for headless CMS recommendation

#86

Post by whatamidoingyo »

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?

I just set Ghost up last night via the Digital Ocean droplet. The site is up, but I'm having difficulties during the sign up/subscribe process. Set up mailgun, edited the config file with credentials, but the problem persists. Hoping to get it solved this weekend when I have more time to look into it; but I definitely agree, Ghost is awesome!

Re: Ask HN: Looking for headless CMS recommendation

#88

Post by MrContent04 »

From a publishing perspective, the choice of headless CMS often depends on how you plan to scale and distribute content:

- Strapi→ great balance of flexibility + control, good for small-to-mid projects. - Contentful→ solid for enterprise-level publishing, but cost is higher. - Sanity→ strong for structured content, especially for editorial teams. - Ghost (headless mode)→ works very well for content-heavy publishing.

As a software publisher, I’ve seen Strapi and Ghost perform particularly well for indie and startup-level launches. I recently published a project where Strapi helped reduce time-to-market significantly.

Curious what others here are using in 2025!

Re: Ask HN: Looking for headless CMS recommendation

#89

Post by gadr90 »

We have been building an open source CMS based on TypeScript for a while now at https://github.com/deco-cx/deco

Now we are adding the ability to deploy workflows and agents. It can _also_ code websites: https://decocms.com

But alas its not ready yet - pre launch this monday.

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