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Comment by preya2k | Hacker News Reader

The lack of options in this space really baffles me.

Statically generated websites are everywhere and have been popular for many years. Gatsby, Next, Hugo, Jekyll, 11ty, Astro, etc.

Yet, there is a lack of visual editing interfaces for Markdown/Frontmatter/MDX content.

Netlify CMS has been the best solution in this space, and despite many thousands of stars it’s abandoned now.

Tina CMS seems nice, but requires a subscription/cloud account.

Why are there not more alternatives?

Will take a closer look at Outstatic for sure.

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When I started building Outstatic I haven't had heard about Netlify CMS, Tina CMS, nor any other alternatives... thought I was being original with the idea of a UI to manage .md files on Git lol

After I've launched people pointed the existence of those CMSs. I really built this as something to scratch my own itch, halfway through I decided it could be a library.

But as someone else mentioned, it's quite hard to think of a business model around this. I'll keep working on it just so that I can use it in my own blog. If other people want to use it, that's great.

Gitit is another one in this space

Can't believe Netlify CMS has been dropped. That was a really smart little project. For sites of a certain size (which seems to be a great number of webapps), it's an almost ideal solution. Hope any fork picks up sufficient traction.

Bugs do appear to still be tracked and tagged though, so it's a confusing state of affairs.

> Netlify CMS has been the best solution in this space, and despite many thousands of stars it’s abandoned now.

I've noticed this too (https://github.com/netlify/netlify-cms/releases) with lots of open issues which makes me very nervous about using it for client projects. Netlify CMS is more than good enough for solo and small sites but it feels like it never took off like it should even with the backing of Netlify. Netlify's recent pricing changes to their hosting where they charge per Git user who trigger commits isn't great here either.

> Why are there not more alternatives?

Maybe it's hard to make money from? There's quite a few commercial offerings where some try to offer a slice of it as open source.

I'd love an active open source alternative to WordPress with a basic site builder i.e. you can drag and drop pre-built page sections to create new pages and get a live preview before you deploy. Unfortunately, WordPress is still the safe open source choice for ease-of-use of the editors for basic business sites.

For the PHP folks there are a few options.

Ones that I've used include:

- Statamic https://statamic.com

- Jigsaw https://jigsaw.tighten.com/

UX is the hardest thing. Drag and drop sucks IMO. Nothing that non-technical folks actually love, mostly be forced to use what orgs bought. for data entry, nothing beats spreadsheet .. I'm crying.

For anyone wanting to dig deeper, I think the term "flat file CMS" has been coined quite a while ago (and is what the author is aiming at with the Git-based flow). I'd agree that "lack of options for (accessible) visual editing UIs" is true, while flat-file-, database- or API-powered (which in the end is a wrapper over a DB, usually) CMS seem to exist for any reasonably popular programming language - with different levels of maintenance/recent development happening, granted.

What OP is building is not a typical "flat file CMS".

Flat File CMS are typical CMS systems (often times written in PHP) that run on the server, but use files (often Markdown/Frontmatter) as their data backend (instead of a DB like Wordpress, Drupal, etc.) – if you're looking for a really nice Flat File CMS take a look at Kirby (https://getkirby.com) or Statamic.

What OP is building (I think) and what others like Netlify CMS and Tina CMS do, are Frontend Applications (typically SPA) that output a set of content files, which can then be fed into a static site generator (like Next.js, Astro, Hugo, Jekyll), which will built a website from it. Often these content files live on Git – so the common interface between a SSG and the "static CMS" is often Git (or a local folder on your file system). So it's a "smaller" concept than flat file CMS. Typically these "static CMS" only care about content and have nothing to do with templating, etc.

I wonder how people deal with a situation where they build a platform like this and it gets adopted by e.g. political group opposing current regime in their country. A friend of mind built a pretty nice platform, until these groups started using it. He just didn't want to end up in the ditch somewhere so he closed the platform. The money from ads wouldn't even pay for servers, not to mention legal aid or hiring staff to deal with "unwanted" content. Even if you build an open source platform that anyone can self host, you can still run a risk someone being upset about it, that you are making it "easy" for certain groups to spread their propaganda.

It feels like today it is a too risky water to dip toes into.

Publii [1] is still an excellent option in the Hugo-but-graphical space. It has a desktop app and allows hosting on GitHub Pages, AWS S3, Netlify or just plain old FTP.

[1] https://getpublii.com/

Wordpress dominates the space, despite its record of security issues.

Pardon my ignorance, but i've recently been trying to decide on a cms service and it seems like there are too many options (strapi, prismic, contentful, ghost, cockpit, forestry, etc...) What am i missing here?

Agreed. I built https://sitepress.cc/ that uses git + files to manage content in Rails, but it needs an editor.

I’m not sure if the right thing to do is build a web editor or smooth out git workflows so that non-technical people can open content files with desktop software to make changes to the content.

Crafter CMS is a git backed CMS. https://craftercms.org/

NetlifyCMS is abandoned?

Yeah, they've also "officially" said this on their forums.

See: https://answers.netlify.com/t/is-this-project-dead/70988 https://github.com/netlify/netlify-cms/discussions/6503

Geez the first few responses of that forum thread is just an exhausting read of "We've relayed your message to $SOMEWHERE_ELSE and we are waiting for a response.".

Check the commit history on the project. Last real commit was mid April.

Because it is not much simpler than just git + the editor of your choice for developers, and it is still harder to use than Wordpress for non-developers.

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