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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 |