allanlasser

I'm helping the TakeShape team to document more of our behind-the-scenes decision making. This ended up being a fascinating look at the decisions behind picking the right package manager for a monorepo.

If your project is similarly structured, we hope this helps you out! Would love to hear about any similar experiences you've had, too.

TL;DR: It enables you create much more complex websites without the overhead they've required in the past, letting you focus more on client-side experience.

Two years ago I went with TakeShape as my publication's CMS, for two key reasons.

The first was that TS gave us a interactive visual front-end for managing content, which we could then publish as a static (i.e. pre-rendered HTML/CSS/JS files hosted on S3) website. Almost every other existing solution is built on directories full of Markdown files, which would be unusable to the rest of my team of non-technical editors and authors. I wish it weren't the case, but some people just don't want to step outside a WYSIWYG editor.

The second was that TakeShape provides a visual interface for modelling our data structures and exposing them through an API. This allowed us to figure out features and content on-the-fly, without solving for any backend problems (database maintenance, server uptime, etc.), while we test our assumptions. With the API, we can have the option to build out more complex functionality over time.

I built our site using TS's built-in static site generator, but I'm really excited to start experimenting to see if we should port our templates over to Gatsby. What I like about Gatsby is that it makes progressive enhancement much easier for static sites, and I expect it'll let us set a baseline experience with basic, static HTML functionality and then layer richer React-driven interactions on top. We've already hit against some of the limits of static in terms of our identity management and interaction, so this seems like a promising next step.

The publication, if you're interested, is https://massivesci.com

We've been using TakeShape as the CMS behind Massive (https://massivesci.com/) for the past year and a half and have had a great experience. It's allowed us to rapidly prototype new features without much technical overhead.

We knew from the start we wanted to serve static pages for simplicity and security, but so many existing SSGs rely exclusively on rendering folders of Markdown. While this makes sense to developers, we found most editors (the people) need WYSIWYG tools to do their jobs well.

But even on the dev side, it's lent us way more speed and flexibility for prototyping and iterating on data structures and features underlying our publication without any of the maintenance of a more traditional solution like Wordpress or Django.

Right now I'd totally recommend this to freelancers, design studios, or teams who want to deploy something static without sacrificing usability. The one downside is that it does require somebody with web dev experience to provide the templates to present the content.

It's a really unique product that stands in a sweet spot for product-minded teams between something like Jekyll/GH Pages on one end and Squarespace on the other end. I'm looking forward to seeing how it grows.