Show HN: TakeShape, a Headless GraphQL CMS and SSG | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: TakeShape, a Headless GraphQL CMS and SSG

takeshape.io

60 pointsmcat11 comments

Quick comments/question from a designer:

I've played around with TakeShape a little bit but have yet to deploy anything, but am interested in using it on projects moving forward. It looks like this is what I've been searching for as a CMS replacement.

I'm coming from years of freelance WordPress projects and from what I can tell, if you've done any theming in WordPress, especially with the Advanced Custom Fields plugin and custom post types, the transition to TakeShape seems pretty doable. I love the drag-and-drop modeling all in one place. Nice that it's visually baked into the CMS and not a separate plugin/screen/etc.

So question: for someone like me who can do some front-end code, but isn't a "back end" developer, how would you suggest I start to play with building templates using TakeShape? What do you think is the best path forward testing a site build/design quickly to make the call over something like WP?

Thanks.

Check out our quickstart https://www.takeshape.io/docs/quickstart/. It has step-by-step directions to get you up and running nothing with our "Shape Books" sample project. The same steps can be repeated for any of our sample projects https://github.com/takeshape/takeshape-samples. If you are coming from wordpress and looking to build a blog I would check out the shape-blog sample project.

Also I would recommend using Netlify for hosting of static sites. We have a super easy integration with them https://www.takeshape.io/docs/configuring-netlify/

@Alturnwall, I fall in the same camp—I can do some front-end coding, but I'm by no means a backend developer (I honestly wouldn't even use the label developer).

I've been using TakeShape to manage content for mozzstix.com and I've found it incredibly easy and intuitive. It's definitely built for us!

We've been using TakeShape as the CMS behind Massive (https://massivesci.com/) for the past year and a half and have had a great experience. It's allowed us to rapidly prototype new features without much technical overhead.

We knew from the start we wanted to serve static pages for simplicity and security, but so many existing SSGs rely exclusively on rendering folders of Markdown. While this makes sense to developers, we found most editors (the people) need WYSIWYG tools to do their jobs well.

But even on the dev side, it's lent us way more speed and flexibility for prototyping and iterating on data structures and features underlying our publication without any of the maintenance of a more traditional solution like Wordpress or Django.

Right now I'd totally recommend this to freelancers, design studios, or teams who want to deploy something static without sacrificing usability. The one downside is that it does require somebody with web dev experience to provide the templates to present the content.

It's a really unique product that stands in a sweet spot for product-minded teams between something like Jekyll/GH Pages on one end and Squarespace on the other end. I'm looking forward to seeing how it grows.

I've also been using TakeShape for the content API, feeding profile data to a web app for [Parsley Health](https://www.parsleyhealth.com). Somewhere down the line we'll be using it for our website as well. It lends itself well to a multi-use scenario, where you want to centralize your content creation and maintenance.

Also, as noted below, it's an ideal tool for prototyping and one-offs. The hot-reload for local dev based on remote content updates is incredibly slick and fast. It's also an excellent training bed for GraphQL, with the integrated viewer.

Full disclosure: I worked on the project briefly at it's inception , and have been happy to use it in my current gig.

Andrew here the other Co-Founder

We excited to share the tech TakeShape with you. The backend is mostly server-less using Serverless Framework, AWS Lambda + API Gateway. For our data layer we use DynamoDB as our system of record and ElasticSearch for advanced search functionality. The frontend is built with GraphQL, React, Redux, Redux Saga.

I am working on some write-ups on how we built certain features on the TakeShape blog. In the meantime feel free to post technical questions here and I'll try my best to answer in a timely manner.

I know your group used to work at {Newsweek, Daily Beast, Fast Company} (I've worked with both Mark and Andrew before)... I wonder if you could talk a bit about how the experience with these legacy CMSs influenced your design with TakeShape?

I'd also be curious to know which GraphQL server are you using on the backend? Apollo? Any challenges with getting that into production?

At Newsweek/The Daily Beast we used Adobe AEM which was very powerful. It had a flexible JCR-based content model and component based content editor. At the time (5 years ago) it had very little in the way of a content API so we had to build our own solution. We actually used our Content API with Rhino (Java js runtime) to render DustJS templates server-side. This server side rendering we built there inspired aspects of our Static Site Generator. Being able to load a project's GraphQL schema in memory allows us to improve caching when generating a large site.

The content modeling an initial interface was heavily inspired by a CMS we used in our agency work called Webhook (http://www.webhook.com/). It was the first product we found which combined flexible content modeling with Static Site Generation. TakeShape goes one step further to provide a robust API that can be used with by the static site to enable dynamic experiences (think search, tag pages, user generated content).

As far as GraphQL we use Facebook's reference implementation (https://github.com/graphql/graphql-js). The challenge with TakeShape is that we allow users to define their own content types which in turn generates their own GraphQL schema. This makes using high-level server libraries like Apollo which assume a static schema challenging to use. GraphQL itself takes care of a lot of the content functionality on its own. The challenge was adding all the missing pieces like authorization, authentication, rate-limiting, access policies, data validation, etc.

Hi, I'm Mark, one of the Co-Founders of TakeShape.

TakeShape comes out of our experience running Ronik Design, a creative agency, for the past 7 years.

We set out to build a CMS that allowed us to be more expressive with our work while not having to manage a CMS on the backend.

We always wanted a tool like TakeShape so we decided to build it. TakeShape provides all the elements of a JAMStack. Flexible content modeling, GraphQL API and Static Site generation all with a simple to use web UI and CLI for developers.

Interesting approach; good luck

Oh hi Mark!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com