Webiny – CMS powered by GraphQL and React | Hacker News Reader

Webiny – CMS powered by GraphQL and React

github.com

84 pointshunvreus18 comments

The official site looks great. However, I'm a little confused by this product. I'm having a tough time figuring out how content is managed by this system. The github page mentions that this is a serverless CMS. How does that work?

When you describe this as a CMS, I compare it to systems like Wordpress or Drupal. I realize you're selling this as a developer-friendly CMS. But seems like this is a developer-only CMS. How would a non-developer use this system to manage content?

Hi, I'm one of the founders of this project.

Webiny is a CMS that allows you to build pages, similar like any other CMS. But the unique thing about Webiny is that it's designed to run inside a serverless environment like Lambda, plus the fact it uses ReactJs, Node and GraphQL.

Webiny is aimed at developers, but we do also offer a managed hosted version, which any non-developer can use, as you don't need to install of configure anything. Just follow the get started link on our homepage.

In case you try it out and have any feedback to share - I would love to hear it, since we are a new project launched just few weeks back.

Cheers, Sven

> Webiny is a CMS that allows you to build pages, similar like any other CMS

Building pages is different than managing the content. That's the CM in CMS. You've built a page builder not a CMS.

Pages are managed via page categories, which you can create depending on the structure of your side. We also have a module in our roadmap that will allow you to create different content structures, so you'll be able to build more than just pages. Similar what Drupal does.

Thanks for the explanation Sven. I got confused due to the terminology. I've usually seen similar projects referred to as static site generators. I sincerely wish you luck with the project.

There is one recommendation I'd like to make however. In the README, it might be nice to display some sample configuration and/or possibly a diagram explaining how all the pieces fit together. I'm most interested in learning how to get started with Webiny and what are the various cloud things I'll need to configure to get an operating system.

Thanks for the feedback. It's true that at first we might look like a static site generator, but we are bit different. Webiny allows you to build APIs, web applications and much more. The dynamic content is at the heart of the system. We are already working on several "dynamic" modules like form builder, content modeling and much more for the upcoming releases, which will differentiate us from the generic static website generators.

In terms of getting started as in installing the and configuring the required dependencies locally, we have a get started tutorial https://docs.webiny.com/docs/developer-tutorials/local-setup. In case you don't wanna bother installing all that locally, you can just click the get started button on our website, and register for a managed hosting option - which is currently free during our beta period => https://www.webiny.com/pricing/

The readme on github is just a short summary, but it points you to the docs portal for more info. Since it wasn't clear to you, others might be also bit lost there, so it's something we might need to review :)

FYI it says “build-in” instead of “built-in” in one spot on the landing page. :)

I posted this, but I'm not involved in this project.

I actually wrote my own CMS for GitHub Pages [1].

By serverless they mean they use AWS Lambda:

> API layer works as a Lambda function with Apollo-Server handling all the GraphQL-related stuff.

1: https://github.com/Wiredcraft/jekyllplus/

If I may suggest, if you are looking static generator that works as a normal CMS try to use Publii CMS (https://getpublii.com)

The idea of a serverless CMS is very appealing, because:

1) Many web sites can logically be built using a static site generator (e.g. Gatsby), from content managed some other way.

2) There are great headless CMS out there (e.g. Strapi), but it seems silly to keep a virtual server running a CMS all the time, when you're probably editing content only 1% of the time.

I would maybe also add: 3) Scalability

Scaling lambdas is so much faster when compared to an auto scaling zone.

How does this compare to strapi and keystone v5?

Hi there,

Strapi is a headless CMS - meaning there is no presentation layer where you can view your content. You just get a JSON back. Webiny comes with a visual page builder, as well as a presentation layer. At this moment Webiny doesn't have a headless module - but that's something we are working on.

Keystone is more a web framework with a base set of modules, so I would say it's similar to Webiny. However Webiny is designed and built from ground up to run inside a serverless environment.

How do you manage the database and scheme?

The database lives outside the lambda environment. Unfortunately the serverless stack still doesn't have a a way of solving a problem when it comes to storing the data inside the serverless functions.

Webiny uses MongoDB, for the manage hosted versions, we actually run on AWS DocumentDB.

Hope this answers your question.

Interesting. Why not use DynamoDB?

Just to add to that. We also have a MySQL/Aurora database adapter. Since the built-in database layer allows you to write an adapter for any database type, be that NoSQL or SQL. If you are interested in using Webiny with DynamoDB, it's possible, with the right driver.

Ease of development - especially when you are developing locally. Also we didn't want to get locked into AWS ecosystem, especially since we have an open source version, which you can technically host yourself on any cloud provider.

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