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by polymath21 3376 days ago
How does this compare to Contentful? I've been trying to combine their headless CMS with Middleman but it hasn't been that easy to use, although the experience I'm trying to create is non-standard (imagine a normal blog post but with cards inserted throughout). Plus, the cheapest paid plan is $249/month which is really hefty when compared to the competition. Their free tier does give you a good amount of features though and their admin UI is the best.

I was planning to deploy my site onto Netlify once done. Wondering if maybe your CMS is a better alternative to Contentful and I should just combine services.
2 comments
toddmorey 3376 days ago
Contentful is nice and since it's been around longer, it's a bit more baked. However, there's an amazing feature of static sites that are based off of local content (markdown and yaml files, for example): every aspect of your site can live in git.

Treating the content like code offers the advantage of being able to easily roll back a website to any one point in time, and I think it generally makes collaboration between designers, coders, and content editors easier.

When developing, it's really nice to just create a new branch and work on the content and design all at the same time.

The aim of this CMS is to hopefully offer the content editing experience of Contentful without requiring an external dependency, while also keeping all aspects of your site tightly integrated with your git workflow.

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polymath21 3376 days ago
But the whole point of me using Contentful is that a non-developer will have an easy time editing content within Contentful vs. having to set up a local way of accessing those markdown/yml files through a git repo. Or do you somehow abstract that away?
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redtuesday 3376 days ago
Yeah, that would be nice to know, because that is one of the reasons I use Contentful at the moment. The source is on github and triggers Travis if I push changes, which in turn get's the content from Contentful, builds the static site with metalsmith and uploads the site through FTP. Or if the non-developer makes changes on Contentful this triggers Travis as well etc.

Works quite nice so far (especially since I didn't need to explain how to optimize the images) but would prefer a open source solution.

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toddmorey 3375 days ago
Late reply, but content authors only need to create a GitHub account for this cms. They don't need to run git or anything else locally.
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redtuesday 3376 days ago
Have you seen Contentful's webinar about lookbooks? Sounds like it could help: https://www.contentful.com/blog/2015/09/10/creating-a-digita...
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polymath21 3376 days ago
This does look useful, thank you!
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