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Comment by neeksHN | Hacker News Reader

It'd be rather refreshing if one of the headless CMS PaaS solutions could follow an open model similar to WordPress/Gitlab

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Hey! I'm one of the co-founders of GraphCMS.

We will soon start open sourcing our content management interface, so users have the opportunity to customize the CMS UI to their needs. Most of our customers just want us to take care of the hosting.

+1, very much looking forward to that Show HN.

Can you compare pros/cons to Contentful?

GraphCMS is the only CMS that exclusively offers GraphQL. Other CMSs have since entered the space to offer GraphQL technology, but they still try to maintain both REST and GraphQL APIs which will lead to some maintenance issues in the future. An example of this is that the other CMSs aren’t able to offer a “mutation” API for their CMS through GraphQL. With our CMS you can query the data and change it through the same powerful interface. This opens the door to a wide range of tooling and custom workflow enhancements. Additionally, because we only offer GraphQL, we are able to be more agile with changes to the technology.

In the future, our focus will shift even more to content based BaaS as we will support end user authentication. We are also preparing a new suite of workflow tools that will make managing large datasets a breeze.

Yes, I'd be interested if I could self-host. As others mentioned, having this externally hosted introduces another potential point of failure.

+1 Very interested in self hosting. Especially to meet data residency and locality requirements for a few projects that I have.

> We will soon start open sourcing our content management interface, so users have the opportunity to customize the CMS UI to their needs.

"We're going to open source the interface" is a disingenuous answer to the question. Documenting an interface isn't open source. If your plan is "proprietary SaaS", just own it.

There are lots out there, but the terminology is not consistent so it's hard to identify them.

Perhaps one of these would serve your needs:

https://strapi.io

https://getcockpit.com

And to add to your list: SilverStripe framework 4.0. Their PaaS solution is pretty pricey, but it's opensource so you can run it yourself.

Their software ecosystem is mature as well, as they've been around for a while.

Agreed! I'd much rather have a GraphQL-based headless CMS to the WordPress backends I usually work with, but everything I have seen is a hosted service rather than something I could download and host on my own. Usually isn't cheap, either. It's been a real turn-off for me.

It's really, really hard to build an open source (free) product that makes any money. GitLab works because it's a very complex product that a few really large companies are willing to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on it. I can't imagine that being true of a CMS.

That being said, different genres of software have "known" price points. For source control, it's expensive. For analytics, it's expensive. For blogs, it does seem like the open source model is the only one that's really taken off... Wordpress and Ghost both use the model, and (for better or worse) anchored the price point of blogging software somewhere between free and $10/mo. Makes it hard for any incumbents, which is probably why WordPress still is so popular.

100% Agree.

WP is extremely modifiable. I think it would be trivial* to turn WP into a headless CMS. I made a proof of concept some years ago and it was great because you could still use plugins to transform the content. Alas, feeding-my-family realities prevented me to pursuit that project.

* Of course with "trivial" I meant possible.

Squidex is MIT license and has reasonable pricing for their cloud offering, also has graphQL support and more feature rich.

Last time I tried squidex the GraphQL APIs weren’t working. I think they are also removing support for their immature GraphQL mutations.

I'm not a fan of pricing with operation limits. 100k API calls per month? What happens in a DoS situation? If it's self-hosted I can blacklist and keep the app running for other users. For a surge in traffic, I can spin up other containers and scale. With managed hosting, my bill can go through the roof, or the the entire app gets shut down.

Ideally, a spike in traffic to your site shouldn't result in taking down your CMS. That's why static site generators are so popular.

Exactly, but many of these 3rd party services charge per API request, which can either shut down your service or spike your bill during heavy traffic.

Not sure if I communicated what I meant. I think if I was going to set up something using a headless CMS, I would integrate it with a project like React Static. When a user publishes something in the CMS, it would trigger a build of the generator that would result in putting some files out in S3 or something equivalent.

That way if you see a traffic spike or a DDoS attack, it's directed only towards static files on S3 and you can let Amazon take care of it. I don't want to be too critical of how people have things set up because I'm sure they have their reasons, but that said I don't think a page request on your site should map directly to an API request to the CMS.

See Directus https://getdirectus.com

Directus is always at the top of self-hosted CMS lists, but one of the reasons I avoid it and other PHP self-hosted headless CMS solutions is due to the difficulties(tech debt) of automating dev environments and CI/CD pipelines across different distros and OSes.

I would have possibly given Directus a spin if it didn't have hard dependencies on the following PHP system extensions: curl, gd, finfo, pdo_mysql and mbstring. Not to go too off topic, but I wish PHP extensions could be installed via Composer and Packagist (similar to how NPM handles native modules).

The problem you're describing is precisely why containers are so popular. You can install and deploy any app even if it doesn't provide user-level installation choices (such as php native extensions)

  curl -O https://github.com/directus/directus-docker/blob/master/docker-compose.yml
  docker-compose up

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