Tina is not a CMS | Hacker News Reader

Tina is not a CMS

tinacms.org

180 pointssgallant54 comments

I love static sites and made some using Hugo. A year later i've started working with WordPress and its ugly/nice (it depends) Gutenberg editor and to be honest, having a look at the quality (yes, there are a lot of excellent plugins and a lot of bad ones) and the availabilty of plugins,i think WordPress is the only platform to go for business oriented websites where seo, caching and other things matters a lot. I've been using wp on production and i'm very happy with it and even if it's far from perfection, even common users learn easily how to use it. Static site generators look like something build for developers instead of non-developers users. What i really miss on WordPress is the capability to produce a static site from a WordPress installation and use netlify for hosting. I know there are some plugins for that purpose but i still haven't tried them.

Did you try the Odoo website builder? It is less cluttered than Gutenberg and support inline edition of dynamic content like TinaCMS (e.g. change product price, name, ...):

https://www.odoo.com/page/website-builder

Disclaimer: I am the founder of Odoo

Odoo is huge. I have interacted with some parts of it. Congratulations on building a fine product like this.

Good to hear some good words about WordPress here at HN. I am working with WordPress based sites since ver 1.5. WP, in trained hands, can do wonders. It can be used as a back-end framework accessible via APIs and can also be used to serve static content.

This. I see that a lot of people just dismiss WordPress without knowing it — or it's ecosystem — enough. Of course that it does have lots of issues, but it's place for certain use cases it very difficult to beat.

I have to back you up here, ultimately I just want to get landing pages and websites done, and Wordpress + Divi gives me that... I’m also now using Wordpress as a static site generator with WP2Static plugin and deploying to Netlify, so now I can get 4x100 for LightHouse. I’ve experimented with Hugo, middleman, Eleventy, Gatsby, Gridsome, Nuxt, Sapper and a bunch of others... but I really just want to hammer out high-performance (page speed and SEO) sites quickly and easily. I hate to say this because I love Gatsby to bits, but ultimately the customer pays for sales instruments from me not my CAAS / JAMStack fetish and tinkering with the latest frameworks. Now I need wordpress forms that integrate with Netlify functions and I’m sorted.

A few years ago I did some emergency consulting for a friend whose WordPress site had been hacked. Moving it (to cloud hosted WP) wasn't just "back up the database, restore it" but also copying a dizzying array of files haphazardly strewn across the local filesystem. Performance was atrocious no matter the hardware. Even if the core is (finally?) reasonably secure, installing plugins is like playing Russian roulette. The closer I looked at how it works, the worse the impression I got.

Pick anything else.

WordPress without varnish just does not work...

"I bought this cheap car, ran it for 20 years without any maintenance and suddenly it's falling apart, I blame the car."

Wordpress unless it's very conservatively configured needs a mechanic every so often.

And before the inevitable question is asked "Why use it in the first place, why not just use X", it's because wordpress is the easiest thing to build out while being user friendly to edit and being flexible enough to add extra functionality too.

Sites rarely stay the same, clients always want random 10-20% of business specific functionality tacked on and they don't know what that looks like till potentially years after the site is built. With wordpress you can typically always add that extra functionality on without rebuilding the site in something new, that's why it's so massively popular.

I agree. The one problem is that static sites are uniformly faster than even the best configured WordPress installation. I've found that the extra fast loading time can make a difference in conversions.

"WP Super Cache" by the creators of WordPress can make any WordPress website as fast as a static website. When properly configured, it will be nginx serving html files.

So much this. We work with WordPress where our non tech savvy cllients have to build a lot of content using page builders. I wish there was an easy way to auto deploy most of the content as static while keeping the power of CMS capability. We either have very User oriented CMSs including WordPress or developer oriented tools like Gatsby/gridsome etc. Sorry but my B2B client is not going to run a "gatsby build" on every new page or post creation.

The sweet spot worth billions would be WordPress type.CMS that auto deploys static content while keeping dynamic features as needed. Caching plugins are just too cumbersome even though they are an option.

So you should try Publii CMS. It's a good use case for this. Very “client oriented”. It can deploy static sites to Netlify, Github Pages, FTP, and so on.

But does it match WordPress in terms of functionality, plugin ecosystem, ease of deployment etc?

Regarding plugins and functionality, not really. But the deployment is easier — and free. For simple sites, it's a real alternative.

A lot of the problems you’re talking about have been solved for years now. A common setup might be Forestry CMS, Gatsby SSG, and Netlify to build+deploy. And Tina Teams will be the future of that:

https://tinacms.org/teams

But my problem is that my customers cannot run cli. they don't even know what command line is forget running anything on it. So are you saying that Tina teams is built for non tech savvy customers who can use th CMS capability but then everything is auto built/deployed static somewhere AND it also retains any dynamic capabilities that were setup ? Here is a use case:

1. Customer logs in to Tina CMS dashboard as admin (similar to WordPress admin login) 2. Customer creates a landing page with dynamic stuff on it. Say a section with some latest blog posts. Again, this is dynamically pulling in from the database. 3. Customer also creates a "Contact Us" page that has a form that auto emails on submission. 4. Once customer has created these 2 pages above (assuming Tina CMS has nice drag/drop building capability like WordPress page builders), now what happens ?

> But my problem is that my customers cannot run cli

They don't need to. Netlify watches your Github repository and automatically triggers a deploy when changed. They just press save and it gets deployed.

> Tina CMS has nice drag/drop building capability like WordPress page builders

It does! So does Forestry, it's called the Blocks feature.

https://forestry.io/blog/blocks-give-your-editors-the-power-...

https://tinacms.org/docs/fields/blocks

>> The sweet spot worth billions would be WordPress type.CMS that auto deploys static content

that's hardypress, or strattic

I'm using hardypress, no auto deploys, but for content editors, it's a easy button press on the top of the admin area.

>> while keeping dynamic features as needed.

is this list complete enough?

https://www.strattic.com/static-tools/

sidenote: this would be extremely valuable, but as a business, it's very easy to copy. No secret sauce, no network effects, no customer lock-in.

There are a few. I've used them instead of upgrading our Wordpress to fix security issues.

We don't use dynamic data, like comments and forms, so the cost of upgrading everything vs just rendering the static site and putting the wordpress instance behind a Basic Authentication is more cost effective.

Another option is to use a static WordPress hosting, like Shifter, Hardy Press or Strattic.

Wordpress definitely is great for some cases, but SSGs absolutely handle SEO, they’re by definition bettyer at caching, they’re immensely more secure, and absolutely capable of building complex sites. At Forestry, we’ve seen a lot of teams have success.

But you’re right, Static site generators have been awesome for developers and less-so for non-developers...Tina is here to change that. The dev experience with Tina is still even better, and it provides the power to make the content editing experience that non-Devs love. Keep an eye out! we’ve been talking to some people and Wordpress support may be in the works soon

You could try Strattic (I'm the CEO) - it's a static site generator for WordPress. It's not a plugin, but rather a platform where we host the WP site and also generate the static output, which we then serve up via CDN. https://www.strattic.com.

Myself and my colleagues have spent the last two months working on TinaCMS, and have learned a lot along the way. We believe Tina is a novel solution for managing website content.

For one thing, as the title of this post mentions, "Tina is not a CMS". Our team also works on the Forestry.io CMS, so we know how to build one of those. As we embarked on the Tina project, we felt that another one-size-fits-all CMS wasn't the solution we wanted. This is why we architected Tina as a suite of libraries to enable frontend devs to quickly compose a more form-fitting content management strategy for their clients.

Another interesting innovation that we discovered along the way was that, by having the CMS live on your website instead of in a traditional CMS dashboard, the correlation between source content and rendered website becomes much more intuitive to those who were not involved in developing the website to begin with. With a traditional CMS, users must have some mental model of how their site is composed. They can ultimately figure out that, for example, they can change the homepage title by clicking on Settings > Homepage > Title or something like that, but requires some trial and error and a lot of implicit rules to remember. With Tina, the editor will edit the Homepage title while viewing the homepage; the information will tend to be where they're expecting it. And by having a short-feedback, on-page experience, even more esoteric rules will reveal themselves more intuitively.

We have been thrilled so far with the response to the public release of this project. We hope to continue to improve and extend the capabilities of TinaCMS, and I'd like to thank everyone who has expressed their enthusiasm and support!

Wow, this looks pretty amazing. I can totally see setting up a Gatsby site with the Tina plugin as a website for small or medium businesses.

For me, personally, I'm happy with VCS-centric workflow... I push a change to git, Netlify picks it up, and fires the build process automatically. I think that'd need to be sovled for small businesses, as the changes are local only (and considering that such a blog is very likely to be executed in a container, that'd make no sense).

I’d like to see version control turned into a first class API that just happens to have source code as one of its payloads.

I’ve worked on so, so many apps that you could loosely characterize as a CMS. I like to say we don’t have a developer shortage, we have too many custom CMS apps sucking up manpower.

> I think that'd need to be sovled for small businesses, as the changes are local only

This is exactly why we created Tina Teams (https://tinacms.org/teams). We will start sending early access invites in 2 weeks.

>"using a CMS feels more like filing your taxes than editing a website"

Loved this quote. I've recently realized this when trying to get a family member (millennial generation) to understand how to edit the simple website she had created using wordpress.

To add a bit of realism: there may be a time when you wish to add something that was not foreseen by the creators, and then you're back at filling tax forms again. It might even be worse because there's no big community yet to provide help. Every CMS out there started with the goal to make things simple, so why should it be different this time?

Tina maintainer here! Tina is not a CMS in the traditional sense. It’s a set of tools that let you make your site it’s own CMS. It’s going to be different, because it’s not the same kind of code. It’s not an app, or even a framework, it’s a ecosystem of libraries. The way it’s structured makes it really easy to extend or customize behaviour.

One of our biggest goals is to build that community you’re talking about, and provide as much help as possible to newcomers. At Forestry—the sponsor company—we take support seriously and will continue to do so with Tina :)

I’m guessing that quote was written by an American. For comparison, I filed my Australian taxes on Friday. My tax affairs are admittedly fairly simple, but I comfortably finished the whole process in under ten minutes including looking up a few things for such items as deductions for my home office. Not all taxes are hard, just as not all CMSes are hard.

The quote was more about the experience (i.e. just a long list of form fields with no context) rather then about the difficulty.

Live demo with a Gatsby website on stage at JAMstack Conf: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPDCmbaEF0Y

Demo starts around 3:45 https://youtu.be/iPDCmbaEF0Y?t=227

I'm currently using Netlify CMS on my Gatsby site for the blog bit. Any reason I should switch to this?

Wondering this as well!

Tina is designed to give editors the live editing experience they want (similar to a site builder like squarespace) while developers maintain control over the project. NetlifyCMS is missing the former. They have their preview templates but it is not an exact representation and requires extra work from the developer.

Tina is also designed so that you can create the editing experience that your customers/clients/coworkers need. Instead of a one-size-fits-all solution, you can give them something that is tailored to their needs.

As well, at the moment Tina only works with git (similar to NetlifyCMS) but we are working on other data source plugins as well (think Contentful, Headless Wordpress, etc).

The 'requires extra work from the developer' would be the main way to improve on NetlifyCMS. You have to create a schema, and then translate the schema and any changes into an editor component. How does Tina do it without this?

I'd do a quick demo for your client/team and see if they have a preference.

Linkt to repo https://github.com/tinacms/tinacms

Napoleon Dynamite reference?

I hope so! "Tina, you fat lard!"

At risk of stating the obvious, "TinaCMS" is a recursive acronym similar to GNU.

This doesn't necessarily prevent "Tina" from having another referent except then "TinaCMS" wouldn't a recursive acronym.

Interesting.. it works for every letter does it not? [_]ina[category]?

For 2 random examples.. LinaPhone, UinaBag

LAME: LAME ain't an MP3 encoder

Of course!

The use of a llama as a logo seems to support this.

If Tina is "not a CMS", then what does "cms" stand for in your domain. Do you have an alternate interpretation of that acronym?

Wiki/documentation repo based on this would be interesting.

Surprised Craft CMS hasn't been brought up.

Tina maintainer here. There has been around how Tina could be used _with_ CraftCMS.

Tina maintainer here! There has been some thoughts around how Tina could be used _with_ CraftCMS. Nothing concrete yet, but it's on our minds!

Is there a working online demo?

Checkout this gastby starter :)

https://github.com/tinacms/gatsby-starter-tinacms

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