Show HN: Pages CMS – A CMS for GitHub

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/

Show HN: Pages CMS – A CMS for GitHub
pagescms.org

This is super cool!

Tried to set it up for our open source Changelog though and getting some errors, it doesn't seem to work with .mdx files

https://github.com/juneHQ/changelog

Anyways this looks super promising

I have a very surface understanding of mdx, but basically it's a mix of markdown and JSX syntax, no? Didn't know you could define some sort of fields like you seem to do with:

  import { MdxLayout } from "components/mdx-layout.tsx";
  
  export const meta = {
    slug: "all-time-high",
    publishedAt: "2022-09-16T10:00:00.000Z",
    title: "All time high",
    headerImage: "https://june-changelog.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/changelog_ath_cd256d0719.png",
    authors: [
    (...)

I suppose I should be able to hack it by defining it as a JSON frontmatter and some custom delimiters.

If you let me know how you would see this working, I'll try and get something working tomorrow.

Honestly as a v1, I'd just love for you to parse out the whole text file and give me a basic markdown editor!

I don't particularly care about having advanced filtering or of parsing my "meta" data

Nice to see a new entry in the git based CMS realm, I really appreciate that you seem to understand the importance of a good user experience for editing content!

Am I gathering correctly that this does not actually require you to host a backend somewhere? The GitHub OAuth will work even if the CMS is just statically hosted on Cloudflare Pages / Netlify? This was something I always found a little strange about Netlify CMS / Decap, the fact that it required you to either use Netlify or self host their git-gateway.

Edit: Nevermind, I saw it does the auth through serverless functions https://github.com/pages-cms/pages-cms/tree/main/functions/a... I guess it's impossible to do it frontend-only, looks like a fair compromise to me