No CMS? Writing Our Blog in React (2023)
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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)
#2I think being in a position where the person writing the content is comfortable with writing code and/or won't make a mistake that will mess with layout etc is pretty unique.
I would imagine that's the most common reason people use a CMS.
Re: No CMS? Writing Our Blog in React (2023)
#3"No grocery store? Growing your own food"
Re: No CMS? Writing Our Blog in React (2023)
#4Really surprising to hear these folks couldn't have written a e.g. Hugo template to fit the site's look and feel in a very short amount of time.
Re: No CMS? Writing Our Blog in React (2023)
#5I'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.
Re: No CMS? Writing Our Blog in React (2023)
#6My 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, CSS and share it.
I tried to use Hugo to integrate a blog in my Rails app but it was a bigger amount of pain than just doing it quickly in your existing code base with all the tools and styles already available.
Re: No CMS? Writing Our Blog in React (2023)
#7I don't want to be the jerk in the comments but this seems pretty poorly conceived.
* What are you going to do when you hire a non-technical writer down the road?
* The handwringing about control over SEO smacks of NIH and makes little sense. It feels like a very thin justification for this weird scheme.
* You are a technical company but you couldn't figure out how to apply your look and feel, which isn't unique and feels like a bootstrap template, to something or anything else.
* Your content is JSON in JS
I'm going through some of your blog posts and I just don't see where this kind of overkill is necessary. Nothing I'm seeing can't be represented in markdown with a little front matter. I mean MDX lets you use react components, which doesn't feel like a good idea to me either but feels like a better idea than this.
I dunno, kind of a strange read first thing in the morning.
Re: No CMS? Writing Our Blog in React (2023)
#8From 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 liketest where is a library-defined React component
It surely is possible, so perhaps I can share some links if others are wondering the same thing.
If you like to roll your own solution for that, you can use the unified ecosystem: https://unifiedjs.com/
However, if you want JSX just do what everyone does and reach for MDX: https://mdxjs.com/
> We thought this would be a no-brainer and that there would be some CMS/SSG libraries out there that made this Markdown conversion process easy and facilitated integration with any number of frontend frameworks.
You thought correct:
- NextJS MDX integration: https://nextjs.org/docs/pages/building-your-application/conf... - Gatsby MDX integration: https://www.gatsbyjs.com/docs/how-to/routing/mdx/
Or check https://jamstack.org/generators/ for more options But since you seem to like
Re: No CMS? Writing Our Blog in React (2023)
#9My 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.
Re: No CMS? Writing Our Blog in React (2023)
#10I don't want to be the jerk in the comments but this seems pretty poorly conceived. * What are you going to do when you hire a non-technical writer down the road? * The handwringing about control over SEO smacks of NIH and makes little sense. It feels like a very thin justification for this weird scheme. * You are a technical company but you couldn't figure out how to apply your look and feel, which isn't unique and…
I'm with you 100%
Maybe I am missing the point, but why would people want to manage their content within their code? It seems incredibly weird and prone to quite messy and unmaintainable code.
I wonder if they even looked into headless CMS options? I just don't understand the thinking behind this, it seems really bizarre and inefficient.
Surely you can just run a headless CMS and fetch content using GraphQL or REST, and have your blog look the way you want it to with React or Nuxt SSR?
Weird...