Show HN: I’m building open-source headless CMS for technical content

In the last few years I've been doing a lot of technical writing, both for my own programming blog and others, and I've noticed there is a lack of good tools for this kind of writing.

Whether that was a programming blog post or documentation, I always had to move back an forth between different editors, and sometimes even other apps for content management and the actual content publication. A lot of copy-pasting, and wasted time.

Based on this experience I decided to try and build a tool that could provide a good experience for this kind of content from writing to publishing. This (I call it Vrite) ended up being essentially a headless CMS, but optimized for technical content and a pretty unique one overall, I'd say.

I tried to combine what can be seen as 3 separate products into one: - WYSIWYG editor (with the addition of code-specific tooling like code editor or formatter) - Kanban dashboard (inspired by my experience of tools like Trello used in larger technical content teams to manage content production process) - The actual headless CMS (content delivery via API, integrations, etc.)

Most recently I decided to open-source it and see if there's any interest in such a tool. Right now the primary focus was my personal use-case (kind-of "promotional" technical writing seen in programming and start-up blogs), but I think, with more customization, something like this could extend to the documentation space and make writing and managing docs a lot easier.

Let me know what do you think about this.

Show HN: I’m building open-source headless CMS for technical content
vrite.io

> If there is to be any point to this, it better have really good integrations into existing documentation solutions.

I'm still trying to understand this product, but it looks like this might be it's best 'feature'. For example writing all your technical Blog posts in `vrite` instance, maybe have a backlog of them managed through the kanban board, and then be able to publish them directly to Medium for example, or codecademy etc.

Not particularly useful to me, but I will play around with local deploy and see if im missing something else.

Yeah, the documentation aspect is something that I started thinking about recently. That's why, currently, Vrite is more optimized for programming/developer marketing blogs rather than documentations. I'm working on proper API docs (Swagger is pretty much a better-than-nothing placeholder), these wouldn't be served by Vrite.

In basically all technical marketing teams I've worked in, things weren't as automated as you might think. Kanban was only there to manage content production stages, while the actual content was to be written in the Dropbox Paper, Notion, GDocs, etc. just to be able to collaborate and go through the review process. In the end the content had to be copy-pasted to WordPress, Ghost, etc. in an entirely manual process with many formatting issues happening in the process.

In environment you're describing Vrite would indeed be a much "harder sell". Making users move to new tool is difficult in general. That said, with proper integrations and import tools, Vrite could be an "incrementally-adoptable" CMS, that you can transition to at your own pace.

That's basically the idea. Currently most useful when you're running a technical/developer marketing blog.