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No CMS? Writing Our Blog in React (2023)

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Re: No CMS? Writing Our Blog in React (2023)

#11

Post by dewey »

politelemon wrote: post #9
dewey wrote: post #6

My first reaction was to think that someone is re-inventing the wheel again for not good reason, but as usual "it depends". If you are trying to have your blog as your main website and not just one sub-category it makes sense to use a blogging framework (Hugo, Ghost, Wordpress etc.), but I realized that having a blog integrated in a product isn't so straight forward if you want to keep your existing footer, header, C…

> if you want to keep your existing footer, header, CSS That's actually pretty simple, and is what CSS is meant to be helping with - there will be a pain of having to wrangle the framework's HTML to fit what you need, but it's doable, and a small price to pay for the benefits the tried-and-tested framework brings.

Yes, but in reality it's not that easy if you want to have a shared footer / header / navbar component.

If you want to use for example Tailwind CSS classes in your blog you also need to integrate it with your build pipeline to add/remove unused classes from the final stylesheet.

Re: No CMS? Writing Our Blog in React (2023)

#12

Post by chilldsgn »

Brajeshwar wrote: post #5

I'm sorry but you lost me at “Write blog in React.” The art/science and tech of writing should be as decoupled as possible from the tools (CMS, React, etc.) Make people write -- then enable the features, UX, and the other facades of a blog with the tooling -- React, Vue, WordPress, Movable Type, Blogger, and FooBar.

Yup, headless CMS exists.

Re: No CMS? Writing Our Blog in React (2023)

#13

Post by archerx »

joostdecock wrote: post #8

From TFA: > My idea was that surely it's possible to write a bunch of markdown, and then have that get wrapped in a bunch of JSX tags that come pre-styled, using the styles of your existing repo? For example, what I expected was to be able to write *test* (Markdown for bold) and then get a component that looked like test where is a library-defined React component It surely is possible, so perhaps I can share some lin…

At that point might as well just write HTMLh instead of writing markdown and making JS convert it to HTML. I feel like I’m taking crazy pills or something.

Re: No CMS? Writing Our Blog in React (2023)

#14

Post by robador »

I think it's great they did what works for them. Personally though, I am starting to believe React, or indeed any reactive framework, is extremely ill suited for most websites. It adds a layer of complexity on many levels that IMHO is not worth the tradeoff. Not only the amount of tooling required (node_modules), also the fact that you're expected to write all your own elements (components) and override default browser functionality, and expect all of that to work perfectly (forever) is baffling to me. React is an extremely complex layer that abstracts away a quite simple and well understood concept: markup. If your content is mostly static, just use markup and sprinkle a bit of js on top of you must. Your visitors will be grateful. If you're building a web based application, which you're probably not, use React.

Re: No CMS? Writing Our Blog in React (2023)

#15

Post by hschne »

dewey wrote: post #6

My first reaction was to think that someone is re-inventing the wheel again for not good reason, but as usual "it depends". If you are trying to have your blog as your main website and not just one sub-category it makes sense to use a blogging framework (Hugo, Ghost, Wordpress etc.), but I realized that having a blog integrated in a product isn't so straight forward if you want to keep your existing footer, header, C…

I'm currently facing the same problem - adding a blog to a Rails app.

I thought Sitepress looks interesting, as its supposed to integrate with Rails. Have you given that one a try?

https://sitepress.cc/

Re: No CMS? Writing Our Blog in React (2023)

#16

Post by dewey »

hschne wrote: post #15
dewey wrote: post #6

My first reaction was to think that someone is re-inventing the wheel again for not good reason, but as usual "it depends". If you are trying to have your blog as your main website and not just one sub-category it makes sense to use a blogging framework (Hugo, Ghost, Wordpress etc.), but I realized that having a blog integrated in a product isn't so straight forward if you want to keep your existing footer, header, C…

I'm currently facing the same problem - adding a blog to a Rails app. I thought Sitepress looks interesting, as its supposed to integrate with Rails. Have you given that one a try? https://sitepress.cc/

I haven't seen that one yet but it looks good and kinda what I was looking for. Thanks for sharing!

I expected there to be many solutions for this problem but wasn't able to find a simple one.

In the end I just generated a simple "post" model and have some ugly admin interface that allows me to paste some markdown into a small box and publish it. Then I'm just using some gems for RSS feed / sitemap handling.

Re: No CMS? Writing Our Blog in React (2023)

#17

Post by nicbou »

dewey wrote: post #16
hschne wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm currently facing the same problem - adding a blog to a Rails app. I thought Sitepress looks interesting, as its supposed to integrate with Rails. Have you given that one a try? https://sitepress.cc/

I haven't seen that one yet but it looks good and kinda what I was looking for. Thanks for sharing! I expected there to be many solutions for this problem but wasn't able to find a simple one. In the end I just generated a simple "post" model and have some ugly admin interface that allows me to paste some markdown into a small box and publish it. Then I'm just using some gems for RSS feed / sitemap handling.

If you natively work with Markdown, consider the static site generation approach. It also means that your content is also source-controlled.

Basically, just convert your markdown to HTML, and dump that into your existing templates.

Re: No CMS? Writing Our Blog in React (2023)

#18

Post by KingOfCoders »

dewey wrote: post #6

My first reaction was to think that someone is re-inventing the wheel again for not good reason, but as usual "it depends". If you are trying to have your blog as your main website and not just one sub-category it makes sense to use a blogging framework (Hugo, Ghost, Wordpress etc.), but I realized that having a blog integrated in a product isn't so straight forward if you want to keep your existing footer, header, C…

I use Hugo to generate HTML without header and footer etc. and serve the HTML parts from my app.

Re: No CMS? Writing Our Blog in React (2023)

#19

Post by maelito »

robador wrote: post #14

I think it's great they did what works for them. Personally though, I am starting to believe React, or indeed any reactive framework, is extremely ill suited for most websites. It adds a layer of complexity on many levels that IMHO is not worth the tradeoff. Not only the amount of tooling required (node_modules), also the fact that you're expected to write all your own elements (components) and override default brows…

> the fact that you're expected to write all your own elements (components) and override default browser functionality

What ? I've certainly not overriden the HTML div, nor the CSS font-weight.

Re: No CMS? Writing Our Blog in React (2023)

#20

Post by onion2k »

Brajeshwar wrote: post #5

I'm sorry but you lost me at “Write blog in React.” The art/science and tech of writing should be as decoupled as possible from the tools (CMS, React, etc.) Make people write -- then enable the features, UX, and the other facades of a blog with the tooling -- React, Vue, WordPress, Movable Type, Blogger, and FooBar.

The art/science and tech of writing should be as decoupled as possible from the tools.

There is nothing about writing that makes this automatically true, and if you look at some of the software that novelists, editors screenwriters, journalists, technical authors, etc use it doesn't really hold water. For example, Scrivener and Shotrunner are closer to databases than writing tools.

Humans have been writing for thousands of years, and modern tech tools to help have been around for about 50. It's far too early to say whether or not tools hinder the process.

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