Recommendations for a headless blog/CMS?
Hey,
I'd like to incorporate a headless blog into my site so I can just pull the posts and style and reuse them across the site.
Does anyone have recommendations for headless blogs/CMSs? Cost and ease of integration being the main factors.
Thanks!
-- Edit --
If anyone wants more thoughts/research then wes bos tweeted a similar conversation - https://twitter.com/wesbos/status/1254772936935739393
I haven't chosen yet but will update this post when I do with reasons why
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Netlify CMS hands down. I started using it about 3 weeks ago, and now have it on all my websites that have any type of blog content. Love it and super configurable.
Thanks! I had a look, but can't find the REST API details for getting posts?
Not entirely if this is what you mean but with Netlify CMS posts are stored in your repository in markdown files.
You don't need to build a front end, deal with API or none of that. That is what you get with the Netlify CMS essentially. Step1: You create a yml file to configure your blog editing options. The files are markdown files in the repo (thanks @stevebenjamins!). Step 2: you hook up an auth provider of your choice (github, gitlab, netlify, etc. I've used all 3 successfully). That's the end of setup. (Docs Here!)
After setup go to your website URL to write content. Production URL or over localhost; e.g. localhost/admin is where you will find and can start editing content.
Thanks for clearing that up, that's helpful 👍
Check out this demo: https://cms-demo.netlify.com of what it looks like
This screams ghost.org! And I host mine on render.com. Super easy to set up and costs about $7/month. Here's my blog as an example: giftworks.io
Thanks a lot, I'll look into this 👍
Happy to share! Have fun building your blog :)
We use Ghost. it's fine, super easy to set up
I'd say use https://ghost.org. Maybe less popular, but docs are nice and clear. And you're minimising your risk of being hacked if you'd go with Wordpress.
Strapi is good, but probably less suited for blogs and more a general purpose headless CMS. I say WordPress + GastbyJS is your best bet.
Thank you! Yes another dev said the same, Gatsby and WP. Cheers!
Hi Jamie!
If you want to try out Ghost as your headless CMS but feel it costs too much to host and don't wanna host it yourself, feel free to check out our new service at https://pubbit.co/
I'd be curious which one you end up with. I personally have not had a chance to explore all of the options out there, but there are many interesting ones to choose from. Let me know!
Thanks, I've got a lot to look into here, this has been really helpful. I'll let you know when I've made a decision and why! :)
I would agree with this. I love the flexibilty and its a very well done product but man is it a pain to host. If I had to do it again I would use self hosted option like netlify cms
Give these guys a try: https://flamelink.io/
Great! I'm already using Firebase for my main site so this could be interesting, thanks!
Hello @JamieGilman, we created a headless CMS based on WordPress that you can take to the front you want. We give you 100% support in everything and we include hosting on Amazon Web Service, security integrations with Auth0 and performance optimization to reach scores of 100.
Our monthly all-inclusive plan starts at $ 12 / month. -> https://gorillasite.tech
Cheers!
Nice one, your site looks nice! Why wouldn't I just use Wordpress for free though?
Cheers!
Doesn't wordpress cost to host it?
Also you have to do updates, security risks etc.
I think there's a basic free hosted version on https://wordpress.com/
Thank you for your comment about our design!
It is built with GorillaSite and the dynamic content is managed from a WordPress Headless.
You can use WordPress for free, our fee covers infrastructure, security, updates, maintenance and support to connect to the front you want or create through our API.
We have thought of users who do not want to have any kind of headache with their backend.
Thanks for your feedback!
Ah I see, I can see the benefits then
I also, very recently, had the same need of integrating a blog into my site so that I can keep my current layout.
I ended up creating my own very simple solution (PHP): https://www.indiehackers.com/post/i-created-my-own-static-php-blogging-platform-21891fea12
I know it's not headless, and you might not use PHP, but maybe the idea of having a different way to integrating a blog into your site helps.
Hey, this is a really nice idea not having the db, I'll check it out! One possible issue though, how would you request all posts with a certain tag or category? Thanks!
In my case I only wanted a blog so I can write articles and link them externally, so I don't need any extra features such as categories or authors.
There could be several ways to implement categories, you could for example group the posts markdown in sub-folders and then make the
blog/category/analyticsonly list posts from theanalyticsfolder. This might be useful and is pretty easy to implement. I think the biggest drawback is that you can only have one post belonging to one category (so no multiple tags).Another solution would be to add the tags at the end of a post,
tags: analytics, web, self-hosted, but the search part would be a bit slow (script would have to read last line of all blog posts and see which contains the specific tags) if you have 1000+ posts.Another solution could be to add the tags in a separate tags.txt file, when you add a new article you can add a new meta line that file
my-blog-post-url - analytics, web, self-hostedand using a regex query could get the list of all blog posts with a specific tag. The drawback of this is that if you ever change the URL (filename) of a post, you would also have to update this file.My favorite solution is the first one, with folder categories, as it is really easy to implement, really easy to update category names or the category of a post (just rename the folder or move the post to another folder), and one category per post might usually be enough. I might implement this as I really like the idea.
Nice one, not having to have a database is really interesting, I wonder if anything else like that exists as a package? If not, you may be on to something
Check out https://strapi.io/ - open-sourced and quite feature-rich.
Thank you!
We've just started using contentful.com and are really loving it so far. Really flexible data models, nice graphql data source, super configurable. Free tier is fairly generous too, probably more than enough for any blog.
Brilliant thanks, I'll check it out 👍
I love sanity.io, pretty easy to use and their pricing is great (and free mostly). Even tho for my current project I've used Notion as Headless cms :)
Great thanks. How did you use Notion, do they have an API?
Just a private one yet :/ Waiting for an official one for almost a year already.
I've written a guide how I did it here:
https://splitbee.io/blog/notion-as-cms-using-nextjs
Thank you I'll have a read of this 👍
ButterCMS (https://buttercms.com) has a dedicated feature just for blogging. Super fast and easy to integrate.
Thanks! I'll take a look
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