Show HN: Coisas, an open-source client-side CMS for static site generators

> t is similar to Netlify CMS and Prose, the difference is that, unlike the first, it doesn't try to be a multipurpose CMS, it lets you edit files, create text files, upload files, browse your files, but doesn't try to look like a fancy CMS with custom schema and objects and all that mess;

Err, "all that mess" are the additional features that actually make it a worthwhile upgrade from GitHub's in built file management. I'm using a CMS because I'd like to interact with raw files as little as possible.

It's interesting to me that, before I learned about databases (circa 2004), I built 3 distinct software products based on flat files (no database). They were all written in PHP (the only backend language I knew at the time). This was before the days of GitHub, so I don't have links to the software anymore, but I may still have the (horrendous) source code. The products were: a forum (!) system called "DatForum"; a chat app called "Chategory"[1] (this one still apparently exists on SourceForge); and a flat-file backed bookmark manager that synchronized with del.icio.us called "LinkDex." I did also build a blog/CMS based on flat files, which I used personally, but it was hardly productized (practically server-side includes). Obviously, using flat file databases is very different from static site generation, but since all of these were written using flat file databases, it would have been easy to optimize their (often poor) performance by statically regenerating the site periodically, instead of reading the flat file database at render time.

[1] http://chategory.sourceforge.net/

This looks great, I think it solves an existing need and could be extended beyond editing files on GitHub, to be a more general-purpose tool.

One suggestion: a demo where a potential user can try editing files without needing to authenticate with a GitHub account. I actually haven't seen the editing interface yet - I'll clone the repo locally since I'm curious, but it would be a better on-boarding process if I could try it first.

This is a weekend hack, not a fully finished and polished project. I'm sorry about the errors if you encountered some. The idea is that things will improve in the near future. Criticism and suggestions are welcome.

Anyone else unable to actually get it to do anything? Running it from their URL: https://coisas.alhur.es/

Didnt work on firefox. Works on chrome.

Is the license MIT?

It looked like but I was not sure (it might also just be that I read it too early in the morning.)

I'm using Lektor[0] as a static site CMS for a non-technical user. It's not super advanced nor shiny, but it does the job.

[0] https://github.com/lektor/lektor

Hello fiatjaf, are there some example sites that we can take a quick look to see how they end up?

Thanks

Crap like this,

Headless CMS Auth by fiatjaf wants to access your xxxxxx account Personal user data: Full access Repositories: Public and private

...makes me think Trojan Horse.