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Using Notion as a headless CMS for our blog

datanarratives.com

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Re: Using Notion as a headless CMS for our blog

#11

Post by tluyben2 »

Notion hasn't been great for me; I wanted to like it and we got it for our team, but everyone is struggling when doing anything besides text. I used it for blogging, but currently only to actually write them, not publish because of the below issues.

It's drag/upload images really dies when it's more than a few (on fiber, but that's not the point; in 2022 you need to remember what you were doing when uploading something and keep trying; it simply forgets the image completely and just shows the 'embed image' placeholder without anything in it for the images that 'didn't make it'). It is inconsistent between web, mobile and desktop; for instance, I make a page with 25 images on my desktop, wait for them to fully upload (it always says 100% done in the top but that's a lie; you have to check every photo in the right bottom); if it fails, remove them and doing it again because usually the first 1-2x half of them will just not make it and when done share on web or check on the mobile app, still half are missing even when fully uploaded according to the desktop.

I don't really trust it work reliably for anything but text & links.

Re: Using Notion as a headless CMS for our blog

#13

Post by mrweasel »

_fat_santa wrote: post #3

I've considered doing this on my own website, though probably won't since it's just me. But IMO this is one of Notion's killer features, the fact that it's so flexible you can use it as a dang CMS.

When software get this flexible I get concerned. Admittedly I have not used Notion, I've only seen people demo stuff they build and articles like this one. From this it sound like Notion is trying to reinvent Lotus Notes and that's something that should make you pause. At least it will for most of us who had to use Lotus Notes some time in the past 20 years.

Re: Using Notion as a headless CMS for our blog

#14

Post by mbreese »

replygirl wrote: post #8
stevenhubertron wrote: post #4

You can use Excel as a CMS and while cool why use it for Prod? Especially because you are locking yourself into a company that may sunset or change pricing on the "feature" at anytime.

the risks here aren't any different from those with using the wordpress or ghost apis for a blog. or using any third party api for anything

That’s a bit disingenuous. Notion is still a relatively new company without the track record or ecosystem of either Wordpress or Ghost. And both of these are open source, so if the companies behind them go under, you could still self host.

I’m happy this use case works, it’s a great showcase for how to get data in/out of Notion with their API. But I wouldn’t use it for anything that I couldn’t migrate to a different CMS quickly.

(And yes, I use Notion)

Re: Using Notion as a headless CMS for our blog

#16

Post by pbteja1998 »

I built an entire product just for doing this.

https://usenotioncms.com

I then used this and built a no-code blogging platform to publish content from Notion

https://feather.so

There is also an open source version for using Notion as CMS.

That can be found at https://github.com/NotionX/react-notion-x

Re: Using Notion as a headless CMS for our blog

#17

Post by eob »

I wrote a few scripts that power automatingpaperwork.com entirely from a set of Notion pages and it was the best “procrastinate writing by coding” project I’ve ever done.

If anyone wants a copy of the code, feel free to reach out (contact details in profile). It’s not buttoned up into a GitHub-shareable project but should be easily adaptable.

Oriented for multi-chapter ebooks with images, but no table support.

Re: Using Notion as a headless CMS for our blog

#18

Post by pbteja1998 »

pbteja1998 wrote: post #16

I built an entire product just for doing this. https://usenotioncms.com I then used this and built a no-code blogging platform to publish content from Notion https://feather.so There is also an open source version for using Notion as CMS. That can be found at https://github.com/NotionX/react-notion-x

What I’m doing with Feather is this:

I give the users a Notion template to duplicate. https://bhanuteja.notion.site/Feather-Blog-Template-3fea2715...

I will then ask them to pick a domain, add the cname. That’s it. I will then get all the content from their Notion page and build a complete blog from it, with tags, authors, search, site map, rss feed etc.

Re: Using Notion as a headless CMS for our blog

#19

Post by Elidrake42 »

intrasight wrote: post #12

Honest question: Is "headless" still a term of art? With most everything being command-line and APIs, it seems a relic from the past.

Absolutely; as an example, last agency I worked for offered both directly integrated and headless Shopify builds. Headless costs a bit more, but came with a translation layer that also integrated with Magento's API in the event the client ever wanted to move away from Shopify.

Re: Using Notion as a headless CMS for our blog

#20

Post by pbteja1998 »

pbteja1998 wrote: post #18
pbteja1998 wrote: post #16

I built an entire product just for doing this. https://usenotioncms.com I then used this and built a no-code blogging platform to publish content from Notion https://feather.so There is also an open source version for using Notion as CMS. That can be found at https://github.com/NotionX/react-notion-x

What I’m doing with Feather is this: I give the users a Notion template to duplicate. https://bhanuteja.notion.site/Feather-Blog-Template-3fea2715... I will then ask them to pick a domain, add the cname. That’s it. I will then get all the content from their Notion page and build a complete blog from it, with tags, authors, search, site map, rss feed etc.

For useNotionCMS.com, it’s a little different. It’s an api product. I give the users an api. People send their Notion page link in the api, they will then get all the data related to that page, including the html version of that Notion page.

People can either use that html and render it themselves or I can do it, and give it to them as an iframe. Depends on their use case, people go with either Iframe or manual rendering with code.

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