Ask HN: What CMS are you using in 2022?
My new client hates WordPress with a passion so I am currently seeing what everyone is using for a CMS that supports a headless architecture.
$300 for the pro version (adds unlimited users with granular permissions and graphql), free-forever single admin tier.
A solid, rich ecosystem of plugins. Supports headless out of the box.
My experience with it, and with Pixel&Tonic, the intentionally small, solid and profitable company behind it have been beyond delightful.
Oh, and DokuWiki uses .txt files for its pages, which can directly be edited from the file system.
Pocketbase (https://pocketbase.io/) piqued my interest after seeing it here and on ProductHunt, but I don't think it would be the right call for a client before it hits a stable release.
I also very much enjoyed OctoberCMS (although it has its quirks), but there was a fairly acrimonious split in the community there, and OctoberCMS is no longer open source, and I haven't used the fork (WinterCMS: https://wintercms.com/)
I enjoyed using Apostrophe (https://apostrophecms.com/) for a while, but ultimately I felt like I was doing a lot of stuff in a way that didn't come naturally to me, and although Mongo seems a logical choice when you look at Apostrophe's page model, it worried me a bit that the data would not be easy to move if I ever wanted to.
We ended up switching to Django, where just an traditional http only secure cookie which we "proxied" from Next.js to the frontend and back was enough and maybe even more secure than all the mangling we had to do with the refresh tokens, etc.
I really wish this trend of fancy authentication mechanisms goes away. It doesn't take in account how easy they make for people to mess up on their implementation/usage of it when things are too complex.
I THINK it does, but I got burned once when it broke last year around the 9.0.0 update, and now I struggle to trust it...
I tend to end up doing something like this: https://github.com/directus/directus/discussions/10101
What frustrates me is that I don't get what's wrong with just using the traditional http-only secure cookie backed by a server side session. That just works, and it's one of the most safe ways to do it. Even banks do it that way. All the JWT temporary refresh token whatever sounds like somebody was just bored and wanted to have fun. Sorry, I was pretty burned out about this. So much that we ended up swapping it for something else.
https://docs.bludit.com/en/api/introduction https://www.gatsbyjs.com/plugins/gatsby-source-bludit/ https://docs.bludit.com/en/how-to/how-to-setup-remote-conten...
Plone for CMS that goes beyond web content, and in security-critical environments. About 7 years ago, I lead a team for a Fortune 50 to build a CMS which was a knowledge base for hardware and software products, intranet for their supply chain team, authoring/publishing environment for technical manuals, vendor extranet, and distribution platform for device OS images. That project is still going strong and once or twice a year, I get a call from one of their engineers/devops asking for advice about some new functionality they're adding to it.
i think most people hate WP because, well, a bunch of reasons, but reason #1 is usually speed -- WP is super-slow if you don't host it well.
so, find a blazing-fast WP host. your client will be like, 'ok'.
In the past year, every WP website my company did became too slow, even I noticed it when using admin panel for adding new features, I mean it's barely usable, constantly throwing 404 errors.
Also, the clients started complaining heavily, but I'm unable to come up with the solution since on test server everything works perfectly. I also had some suspicious that's because of the bad host, because it effects every project done with WP, but the company owner claims differently since he's 'really good' at working with servers.
It's hard to diy it right. You basically have to cache and invalidate like mad and then put varnish and a cdn in front of it and invalidate those too. It's ugly. Pantheon takes care of all of that for you transparently.
And with Advanced Custom Forms, I found WP more powerful than any of the 20 or so headless CMS options out there. And a hell lot better than Drupal. More powerful get easier to use as a headless DB. Drupal has other strengths but they're mostly irrelevant these days.
[0]: https://templates.netlify.com/ [1]: https://www.couchcms.com/
But everyone here hates it. Is this some sort of alternate reality?
- The typical mom & pop business: Squarespace
- Any company without in-house technical leadership: Wordpress + Simply Static
- Any engineering-focused company: Sanity
(i.e. long-term maintenance, hiring, and technical features like internationalization)
Emails (can) have attachments, a subject line, delivery time stamp, and formatted text as content which means that for many use cases, an email is an effective CMS.
E.g., blog posts and static pages like /about or /faqs can easily be done using emails…just needs a bit of creativity.
I haven’t exactly implemented post editing but I have a Medium style post editor built into my inbox. Next step will be to surface the email in the inbox and reply to myself with the correct content.
Also, sorry for the late reply. I didn’t realize someone had replied to the original comment. Hope it helps.
The new admin UI is great too.
I believe headless for drupal is improving. jrockowitz posted a video on his blog with use of schema.org
If any monolithic CMS is going to make it through to that far shore, I feel like it will be Drupal.
Drupal 9: Would've been better, but it's a PITA to set up and maintain. It's also the second most-dreaded tech framework (behind only Angular) on the Stack survey: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#section-most-loved-dre... I will never use Drupal or work for a company that insists on it again.
Contentful, the industry giant, would not give us a quote without a NDA. In hindsight this turned out to be a blessing; we found much more suitable small businesses.
DatoCMS (who we ultimately chose): Really good dev support, small startup means their own devs/founders are very active in support and co-development. Good documentation and examples. Does everything that we need, great plugin support, good choice of fields and schemas. The editors and departments we tested this with, most of whom aren't techies, loved it. I enjoyed it a lot too, especially being able to hang out with the devs on their forums and Slack.
GraphCMS: Similar in many ways to DatoCMS but more powerful (writable/mutable GraphQL API), more extensible schema, better for devs but editors didn't like it as much. This IMO is the most "technically excellent" vendor-supported headless CMS and would've won my "dev's choice" award.
Other similar options: Grav, Sanity.io, Prismic.io, CosmicCMS, ButterCMS, TakeShape, Strapi, Storkyblok, Kontent, Ghost, Directus... here's a good list: https://www.cmswire.com/web-cms/13-headless-cmss-to-put-on-y...
Airtable: Surprisingly capable with its REST API, for the super simple use cases. You'll have to handle permissions and caching yourself though (i.e. proxy the API through Cloudflare or similar). A really good way to get a simple website up and running.
Wordpress with ACF: You can turn off the built-in Wordpress-y-ness and just use ACF if that's better, but your client probably still wouldn't like it. Still waaaaaaaaaaay better than Drupal.
There are a bunch of open-source and/or self-hosted options, but IMO being able to move to a vendor-supported solution with built-in GraphQL endpoints was a DREAM. It meant being able to fully do a Jamstack with Next.js and Vercel or Gatsby/Netlify, and never having to touch the backend again.
Your client edits the content in someone else's CMS, you maintain the frontend, and it all just magically works with no infra maintenance... really frees up support.
As an indie hacker creating new products, and reducing tech debt of older, stable products, scouting for the right tech tools (CMS, CI, cloud services, libraries, etc) represents ~40% of my time. And 90% of it is spent learning something I will discard.
Having hn folks electing the top 3-5 candidates saves a lot of time!