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Comment by jaredcwhite | Hacker News Reader

There is a problem in the CMS industry. Everyone wants to build a headless CMS to power Jamstack sites—only the content itself lives in databases and the CMS is usually a proprietary SaaS. Doesn't leverage Git for content in any way.

This is deeply problematic. We should have dozens, if not hundreds of contenders for "the next WordPress" that leverage Git as a foundational aspect of content management. Instead we have a bunch of Contentful clones (no disrespect to Contentful) with REST and/or GraphQL APIs.

It's bananas that if you search for Git-based CMSes you have NetlifyCMS, and…wait what? Is that all??? Forestry gets mentioned a lot because it's Git-based but that's also a proprietary SaaS. I just don't understand it. Is this a VC problem or a real blind spot for CMS entrepreneurs?

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> We should have dozens, if not hundreds of contenders for "the next WordPress" that leverage Git as a foundational aspect of content management.

If you want a new CMS, give it a shot. But nobody's made a better free version of Jenkins either. It's hard to do and completely unrewarding/unmonetizeable (as FOSS), which is probably why nobody has done it.

However, insisting it leverage a difficult source code version control system is artificially restricting. Start with an MVP of flat files for content and add a plugin system. Somebody will write Git support, but they'll also add other content backends. I'll bet you a million dollars that a custom SQL plugin that does version control will be preferred over Git by 99% of users. But they may wise up and use an S3 plugin instead. Or maybe all three. They'll have choices, and your project will become more useful.

Don't start your project with an artificial restriction and it will be better for it.

One explanation comes from just looking from the content creator's point of view: they kinda don't care what previous iterations of the work really look like (draft-final-v5-oct27-FINAL.doc anyone?)

The things a content creator might be more interested in aren't really core git strengths: SEO, publishing schedules, editorial back-and-forth, social media, etc.

"SEO, publishing schedules, editorial back-and-forth, social media"

Hmm, not really core PostgreSQL strengths either. What am I missing?

Postgres can automatically optimize those things.

Wordpress isn't popular because of its choice of database or any specific technology, it's popular because it's feature set is user-centric.

> if you search for Git-based CMSes you have NetlifyCMS, and…wait what? Is that all???

There are some more. I know of Grav which I intend to use migrating from NetlifyCMS. It has flat-file storage and Git connectivity. I think it can be installed on my shared hosting provider by just unpacking the thing (I don't have Composer / shell access).

https://getgrav.org/features

I’m under the impression there is still plenty more you can do with a database backed CMS then you can with markdown files. For instance difficulty marking pages as related to one another. You could use the slug, but if you later change the slug, you must track down all of the pages that relate to it and update the slug there too. Aka no normalisation.

I agree, I had this debate recently for what to use on a static site and we went with a Git-based CMS (https://content.nuxtjs.org/) over Strapi. I use nuxt/content for my personal site as well and really enjoy working with it.

Maybe FrontAid CMS might be interesting to you, even though it is also proprietary. FrontAid CMS is similar to Forestry, but stores all your content in JSON instead of Markdown. It is therefore better applicable to (web) applications in addition to simple blogs. https://frontaid.io/

I'm a big fan of mkdocs. If I were going to build a blog again I'd power it off of mkdocs.

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