> so your production website loads whatever latest asset version from a floro api endpoint and my repo state is not a snapshot anymore of what what the page will look like on production?
Yes! But it’s your choice to decide which plugins to do this with. You can break your build environment without breaking your production environment, which is really important because you want CI to catch something like a missing icon or a bad invocation of a pluralized string but you also don’t want to block being able to update safe production changes like correcting a minor-typo. Breaking a build because an assets was deleted is easy to resolve for engineers.
> in that case why do the repo connection at all? isnt floro then much more a cms / custom database with versioning for translations/ assets/ colors than an extension of the repo side?
I think it would be very intellectually dishonest to say otherwise (with some minor caveats) but you could say the same about code too. Isn’t github just a CMS for code?
The thing about the snapshot that the code imports at compile time is it allows you to determine the structure of how the application consumes assets in static analysis. This is what allows you to determine what is safe to update live and what isn’t. Could you do this by snapshotting a database and performing static analysis on your imports? Yes, you certainly could but that’s not what CMSs do at all ...and SQL is really not good for merging things. Headless CMSs are built for really redundant data-structures because that’s what marketers need and they nearly all suffer from the same CI/CD issues for that reason. Why do we mostly check i18n string into git and not use CMSs for string content?
Ignoring all the other parts of version control we’re taking for granted here, branching, peer reviews, merging, etc. The big benefit of it all working offline is that you can let the non-engineers, who either lack access control to git or could not technically manage setting up the code base, test out content changes locally on your production site or app. CMSs can do with this with iframes but again, it’s really for blogging content/static content and not i18n. The other area where offline testing shines for people who aren’t engineers is being able to test out content changes on mobile devices over the local-network. That’s not really a thing CMS systems can do at all.