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39 Comments

Best way to have CMS on /blog ?

Hi everyone, I have a problem,

For www.scrapingbee.com we've used landen.co by @Felixg to build both our landing page and blog.

Problem is, we now need real cms as we really want to write lots of content soon.

Do you know any easy way to keep our landing page on www.scrapingbee.com and to have that CMS on www.scrapingbee.com/blog.

I've tried to hack things this weekend with Gatsby / Ghost / Netlify but could not find any interesting solutions.

Ideally, we don't want to deploy a custom solution on AWS.

Thank you very much.

  1. 2

    I personally like the Ghost (as CMS admin), Gatsby (Frontend), and Netlify (Hosting) combo.

    1. 1

      Yes this one is nice, I tried it but had some trouble tweaking Gatsby in a very simple way, I might come back to this though.

  2. 2
    • Gatsby + Contentful
    • Gatsby + CosmicJS
    • Gatsby + KeystoneJS
    • Gatsby + Strapi
    • Gatsby + GraphCMS
    • Gatsby + .md files stored in the codebase
    • Gatsby + .md files stored in codebase + https://forestry.io

    or replace Gatsby with Next.js and any of the above

    1. 1

      Wouah, thank you very much for this extensive list, I'll definitely take a look !
      Awesome!

  3. 1

    Just in case you've not chosen yet, consider www.conteidon.com. I can set up a demo for you and help with integration. Let's grow together 🙂

  4. 1

    Gatsby with Netlify CMS hosted on AWS Amplify Console is both a breeze and free.

  5. 1

    Hello Pierre!
    Are you looking for a full fledged CMS or a static blog would work?

    Why not just using jekyll, pelican, etc. With your own template to blend in with your own landing page?

    1. 1

      Yes you are right, blending our landing page into Jekyll might actually be the easiest way to do it

  6. 1

    It's not what you have asked for, but still I think is by far the best solution for the long term: switch to Webflow.

    Webflow is cheap, insanely fast (my website has 99 on desktop and 96 on mobile with pagespeed insights), has the best CMS I have ever tried and it is pretty easy to learn.

    I saw your website and it is basically a single page website plus terms and privacy. You can rebuild it in one day of work. You will have more flexibility on the design too. There are lots of really great and cheap templates in case you don't want to spend time on the landing page.

    Webflow also recently got $75 million in funding, so it will improve a lot and it is probably here to stay in the long run. In any case, you can export the code.

    The only two cons I see are the fact that you don't have 100% control on the URL (your url will be scrapingbee.com/blog/your-title, you can change "blog" with other words but can't have something like scrapingbee.com/your-title) and there is no alt tag for images.

    1. 1

      Thank you very much for your answer !

      We've tried WebFlow before and it felt like we needed to learn a lot to have a result not nearly as neat as what we got with Landen.

      It might be pointless but I know I am very bad at choosing color palette, font and all the little things that makes a landing page "clean".

      I've tried WebFlow before and I found it way too complicated for what we wanted to achieve :(

      1. 1

        I understand what you are talking about. The first time I tried Webflow I hated it. The second and the third too. Then, I started liking it a lot and now is my favorite tool.

        But again, I understand if you want to avoid spending the time to learn it. There are many good alternatives for adding a blog to your website. Good luck!

      2. 1

        Heard the same thing from many founders who want a website that they can edit without hiring designers for every change they want.

  7. 1

    Why do you even have a problem?

    What actual benefit does using path x/blog vs subdomain blog.x give?

    Search engines flow link juice though just fine to/from blog.scrapingbee.com. And then with clean blog subdomain you can use whatever CMS suits you best, without hideous hacks.

      1. 1

        Both links are from 2015... Half a decade is a very long time in search engine evolution.

          1. 3

            Daolf I think you are right, if you really want SEO juice you should put the blog on the main domain.

            1. 1

              Yes this is exactly what I want to do!

          2. 1

            Well I browsed through the links, and they all did make a case against using subdomains.

            Then on the other hand, none of the links had any actual statistics, they focused on explaining difference of subdomain and subfolder, and smelled like cheap content marketing articles re-heating the 2015 era "use subfolders" mantra without evidence.

            And then there is Google, who states that subdomains and subfolders are treated equally.

            And we have the major corporations, of which majority use blog.x.com subdomains as structure..

            Shall we call it a draw? Neither of us knows the truth, none of the links prove anything, and you can progress on the subfolder path that you have chosen without me whining any further? :) :)

            1. 1

              The truth is pretty well known.

              For Google, sub-domains and sub-folders are exactly the same. The problem is on the user part. Having a good and clear website with a sub-folder is a lot easier, so, when possible, sub-folders should be the way to go.

              This also answers your doubt about major corporations. They can hire great and specialized talent in any function and build a clean website structure with sub-domains.

  8. 1

    sytescope.com (my company)
    Lets you build sites quick and easy. If you're interested let me know and I'd be happy to give you a discount.

    1. 1

      Thank you ! I'll keep you update ;)

  9. 1

    I believe fly.io can do this

    I have our whole main root domain run on a linux shared host with wordpress at the root and various other CMSs installed in subfolders. i.e. separate instance of wordpress for /blog

    For the SaaS app itself that we use different servers under a subdomain. i.e. app.referralrock.com

    1. 1

      Interesting, I did not know that, I'll take a look, thank you !

  10. 1

    I use forestry.io + hugo + github + netlify combination successfully in similar case.

    1. 1

      I guess you meant forestry.io I did not know about this one, I'll check it out.

  11. 1

    What features are you looking for from a CMS?

    I was able to convert a ghost site to static - https://versoly.com/blog and then host it on S3, was a little hacky but it loads very fast and could be automated easily.

    1. 2

      Basically category, code highlighting, being able to have nice meta on each article.

      Nice results!

      1. 1

        Good to know we're building the blogging platform for Versoly at the moment, we want it to be a fully fledged CMS with categories, tags, authors and meta.

        Basically everything Wordpress give you without the headaches of plugins, security and page speed.

        Would love to talk to you during the process, no selling just feedback :)

        Feedback would be on

        • Text editor (images, code highlighting, video)
        • Design of the blog
        • Lead capture (CTAs)
        1. 1

          Hey great ! Happy to give you feedback whenever you need it !

  12. 1

    hey Pierre, one good thing to know is that you can now proxy requests with Landen. So you could setup a Ghost blog and set the domain to www.scrapingbee.com/blog or something like that but don't change your DNS settings which point to Landen already. Then you'll need an IP address or an alternative CNAME. Then you can tell Landen to proxy anything from /blog/* to your Ghost blog for example. If you need help setting it up, just let me know!

    1. 1

      Hey Felix!

      Actually this solution could work but I have two questions:

      Let's say landen_domain.com/blog redirect to cms_domain.com then:

      • what happened to assets required through a relative path on cms_domain.com, I guess it will be interpreted by the browser as landen_domain.com/blog/assets and then 404 no?
      • SEO wise I guess Google will scrape both websites and I'm not sure it's a good thing.

      Any thought on that?

      Thank you very job, and again, good job on Landen.co, it rocks!

  13. 1

    There are a lot of options out there for this. I've used and had success with Strapi (https://strapi.io) in the past.

    1. 1

      Hey, thank you! Did not know about this one!

  14. 1

    "we now need real cms as we really want to write lots of content soon"

    Go with WordPress. I know it is not the shiniest thing tech. wise but it is the most robust CMS out there with tons of support and plugin ecosystem.

    1. 1

      Hey, yes thank you very much!
      WordPress is an option but to be honest I am not really eager to go back to it.
      I remember having to use it 5 years ago and I don't keep and unforgettable memory of it to say the least.

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