tonyspiro

Great! A vote for Cosmic is a vote for change https://cosmicjs.com/pricing

Thank you for the feedback. I built a career building WordPress websites as well so I do have gratitude for the product and the ecosystem that it has built. But for years I did encounter these problems myself, maybe you or others have not, but this was my experience.

As for the semantics, you are correct, we are not proposing that you can use Cosmic to connect to your WP backend. We provide a light-weight solution to add dynamic content to any website or app. We offer a web dashboard to create content and API tools and resources to integrate content into any website or app. No infrastructure management needed. Our customers benefit from using Cosmic because they can avoid the pain of building and managing their own CMS infrastructure. But if you need that level of control and you like managing infrastructure, that's fine, then you may not be a customer.

We are seeing more and more services that offload these non-core infrastructure services: Stripe, Twilio, Algolia. They add value to development teams that do not want to manage infrastructure. That's our opinion on how content should be managed.

Hope this helps see things from our perspective. And I have taken your feedback in a cheerful spirit, as I hope you have taken my reply :)

You CAN do server-side rendering. Check out our apps page to see how you can integrate dynamic content into any website or app, server or client-side: https://cosmicjs.com/apps

Thanks Emil!

This is a good point. It's a challenge to convince CTOs to choose a startup to depend on for mission-critical services. For the most part, the trend is moving to greater trust for vendors that provide these services: Stripe, Twilio, Algolia. We're betting this trend will continue. And in the meantime, we're doing our best to off-set the fear of vendor lock-in with an easy export feature to export all of your data if needed.

Our target customer is not a consumer, there are plenty of consumer CMS choices in the market. We're trying to solve the problem for teams of developers and content creators who don't want to waste time diverting developer time to CMS management.

Developer time is expensive. Allowing devs to focus on the core-product instead of CMS infrastructure is a big time/money saver. This is the value prop for most all API-first services: Stripe, Twilio, Algolia. Why would you build your own "free" payments processing / telephony / search service when these focused services have done a really good job solving the problem for you?

Great! Let me know if you have any questions :)

Thanks for the feedback. Our target customer is a team of developers and content creators that have experienced the pain of building and maintaining an installed CMS (could be any number of installed CMS systems WP being the most popular). If you haven't experienced that pain / are ok with it as a trade-off, that's fine. You're probably not a customer.

And I spent years building WP websites, made a career out of it for a while, so it's not anything against WP and certainly don't intend to come across the way you described. So really Cosmic JS was built to satisfy my own needs that I didn't get from an installed CMS.

That's right, Cosmic JS apps are fully-built websites and apps.

Extensions are more like WP plugins: https://cosmicjs.com/extensions/

Indeed, developer time is expensive. They shouldn't spend it in CMS code :)

If you look at trends in the CMS space, WordPress is losing favor: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge...

63.2% of developers voted it most dreaded in the 2018 Stack Overflow survey (narrowly beat by Windows Phone) https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018/#most-loved-d...

Our customers benefit by avoiding the pain of building and maintaining their own CMS infrastructure so they can focus on their core product. And we have a growing community that is adding more value through education and resources for every new user.

You're right, our target user is not a consumer who has many options for a consumer CMS. Our target customer is a team of developers and content creators.

The folks at Heroku have the 12 Factor App https://12factor.net

Froala is still my WYSIWYG editor of choice https://www.froala.com/wysiwyg-editor

Yes it is. I just submitted it.

Hey,

I'm Tony Spiro, the creator of Cosmic JS. Just wanted to get some feedback on the new Cosmic JS home page. What do you think of the installation instructions right on the homepage, and moving the copy to the "Features" page? I took notes from the Express JS home page and Stripe to get right to the point.

Thanks for checking it out! Tony

I added some new sentences to the README.md file which explains the organization:

"I tried to keep the organization as simple as possible. There are no client, server or shared component folders. All components are shared and the only difference between client and server are the entry points (app-client.js, app-server.js, app-deploy.js)."

I think there are a lot of universal react example boilerplates out there that over-complicate the app components.

Thanks checking it out!

I'm not sure about the speed difference between 0.13 and 0.14. Do you have any links you can share?

- Tony

Shorti helps you style your React components by rendering short-hand "class names" into inline styles. Also works in React Native and as a separate file in the browser! For browser support, include shorti-browser.js and add "shorti" as a class along with your other Shorti class names.

This is a work in progress, so please add to it!

Thanks for the response. I can see how it could be misleading to compare the React SPA version of my site vs the WP site based on an AB test, however, the results are there to show you the benefits of the React-rendered application are not only between pages (which you can easily see and experience the speed enhancement) but also the fact that you get to "First Paint" first. By limiting the server overhead (I could've enabled compression for the React Express server, but I didn't), you get to the page sooner. And although the "fully loaded" times appear about the same in the links you provided, the perceived speed by the user is much faster on the React version. Do you not agree?

Cosmic JS allows you to create an on-the-fly CMS / API to power your full app or website or you could also integrate it with only a part of your website.

Check out the Docs to learn about the Cosmic JS API: https://cosmicjs.com/docs

There's also an easy export plugin available for an existing WordPress site: https://github.com/cosmicjs/cosmicjs-wp-export

FYI, there's also a browser version: https://github.com/cosmicjs/cosmicjs-browser

An example React app that uses the Cosmic JS browser client: https://github.com/tonyspiro/react-flux-cosmicjs

Not exactly. Cosmic JS is a flexible, platform-agnostic cloud-hosted CMS, whereas the one you linked to is installed and locked into Node / MongoDB.

Very cool. This is very similar to a repo I recently published: Data-driven React application using the Flux pattern and the Cosmic JS browser client. https://github.com/tonyspiro/react-flux-cosmicjs

Looks like the links don't work on the description. Here's the clickable link: https://cosmicjs.com/

There are a few client libraries available for:

Node https://github.com/cosmicjs/cosmicjs-node

Browser: https://github.com/cosmicjs/cosmicjs-browser

PHP: https://github.com/cosmicjs/cosmicjs-php

And checkout some examples: https://github.com/cosmicjs/cosmicjs-examples

Thanks rahimnathwani, I've made the edits / fixes you suggested to the article http://tonyspiro.com/building-a-simple-react-application-usi... and repo https://github.com/tonyspiro/easy-flux-example

Congrats and happy trails on your new adventures.