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Comment by mmanfrin | Hacker News Reader

Question tangential to Gatsby for those of you who use such static site builders as blogs: are there any good tools for writing/composing posts or are you all doing it by hand?

I have set up the same blog maybe 3 times and I always stop posting because I need to be in my coding environment to do so (and if I'm there, I might as well be working on code). I'd really like to find something that I could use to make a post on my gaming pc, for example, where I can add images easily (and have them resized properly). I feel like I should probably just set up a wordpress site, but wanted to know if I had other options.

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> I have set up the same blog maybe 3 times and I always stop posting because I need to be in my coding environment to do so

I had a similar problem and solved it with Forestry[0] and Netlify. Forestry has a nice web interface for writing posts; saving causes the changes to be committed to a GitHub repo. Netlify[1] watches the repo and rebuilds/redeploys the blog.

It sounds a bit complicated, but I've run this setup for 9 months now without any serious issues. To write and publish a new post, all I need to do is: login to Forestry, write the damn thing, and hit "save". The cost is $0.

0 - https://forestry.io/ 1 - https://www.netlify.com/

forestry seems like a brilliant project, thanks for sharing!

Full disclosure: I‘m a Developer Evangelist for Contentful

A “Headless CMS” is one way to achieve what you’re looking to do. Contentful is one, there are others. Gatsby’s has source plugins for all popular ones.

They have a nice getting started guide for Gatsby + Contentful: https://www.gatsbyjs.org/docs/sourcing-from-contentful/

I'm using Ghost + Gatsby for my personal website / blog [1].

[1] https://www.ronaldlangeveld.com

I use [Forestry](https://forestry.io). I migrated from Wordpress, and needed a way for my non-technical family members to continue editing their blogs. Details at https://dev.clintonblackburn.com/2019/03/31/wordpress-to-jek....

You can use wordpress as your CM. Write posts and they appear in your Gatsby site. Contentful is probably a better option though...

https://www.gatsbyjs.com/guides/wordpress/

you can.. though, honestly, i'd advice against wordpress + gatsby. in my experience, because of various plugins required to do various things, the way media is fetched etc, and the highly difficult task of getting things working with schemas in wp.

also, wordpress builds tend to also take the longest.

if you enjoy hacking on wordpress and debugging weird issues, then this might be a good choice.

It's much easier to build a blog using prismic, contentful, or even the netlify cms kind of is nice for a basic "serverless" blog/cms.

honestly, i'd take markdown files in a bunch of folders any day over gatsby-source-wordpress.

I wrote a ms word transformer for GatsbyJS. I like it because it lets me add images and stuff and generates the content without having to muck with urls etc.

https://github.com/abhiyerra/gatsby-transformer-ms-word

Seems like an ugly hack compared to all the "cool" tech mentioned here. But well done, I'll be the first one to star it!

That's why I built Jekyll+: https://github.com/Wiredcraft/jekyllplus#readme

In a nutshell, it offers a better UI to edit your content on a Jekyll site by talking directly to the Github API.

This looks great, thank you!

You could use gitlab pages + netlify cms + gatsby; The Gatsby docs have an example: https://www.gatsbyjs.org/docs/sourcing-from-netlify-cms/

I had the same dilemma when I wanted to launch a food blog last year. I ended going with Ghost on a digital ocean $5/mo droplet.

We also integrate with Gatsby if you want the best of both worlds :) https://ghost.org/docs/api/v2/

I’ve got a site that requires non-technical people to post, and I’m looking into using Contentful or Netlify CMS as their content editing UI, which in turn triggers a build and deploy. (I use Middleman but Gatsby should be able to do the same.)

take a look at prismic as well.. it has some nice features for "normies" .. although it is missing a bunch of nice features from contentful.

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