Testing Git based CMSs

Every now and then I am looking for a better editing experience for my website content. Currently I am simply editing the content either directly in GitHub or else in Visual Studio Code. This is fine, about the only inconvenience is dealing with image uploads: resizing, optimising and adding to the content. The last time I looked into a CMS was about 18 months ago. My requirements from back then haven't really changed, although I am now willing to pay for the CMS if it is really going to simplify my life.

Recently I have come across two open source projects which look promising:

They are in fact quite similar and can be added to a website without needing a real host, they use netlify or cloudflare for the GitHub authentication parts, the rest is client side code. In fact Sveltia is a fork of Decap CMS, which itself is a rebrand of the no longer supported Netlify CMS. Both do a nice job of putting a front end on the GitHub experience, but neither seems to fit in too well with my specificities out of the box (eg collections and assets that contain sub folders). Getting them to work through Cloudflare also takes some fiddling, but it does work in the end.

I still miss Forestry, which was replaced by Tina.io, but that is too focussed on Next.js sites for my liking. I decided to give CloudCannon, Strapi and Sanity another look. But they either had too many proprietary aspects (Sanity), needed to be self hosted (Strapi) or just not quite what I wanted (CloudCannon). I guess I will just have to stick with GitHub and VSC. No harm done.

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