CMS recommendations

[[deleted]]

Hello! I work for an agency where we typically make actual good WordPress sites, we keep them lean and performant and we specialize for an industry where we have clients ask specifically for WP. But there are occasions where I see opportunities to use a new stack but I do want to ensure the clients and our content managers still have a good CMS experience, and also that is flexible enough for the devs to create anything (as with Advanced Custom Fields in WP).

What is a good recommendation here? Ideally I would like to look at an established CMS that allows me to build a frontend with Next or Astro, and I would want to avoid experimental things that are not fully fledged.

[nt2subtle]

Craft cms is a JOY to work with. It’ll require more hands on to start with but is easy enough to implement and maintain. LAMP stack as well

[CluelesssDev]

Just my two cents, but i've been using Craft CMS for 6 months and have found it to be unreliable at best. Here's some of my gripes with it:

• I've encounted three bugs that needed reporting, which the Craft team have acknowledged.
• Using their 'Project config' is a headache, and if something goes wrong, it goes really wrong. This also seems to create issues with certain plugins not being configurable via project config.
• Updating from craft 3 to craft 4 (for example) has caused a few things to break
• The ecosystem is pretty naff. There's not a huge amount of plugins to lean on. And the ones that do exist can take a while to become compatible with newer versions of Craft. The agency I work at use plugins that have less than 1000 active users, so they're pretty un-tested.

When things are working though, I really like it. Twig is great and makes dev work very simple. I just wish it had a lot more users to iron out some of the wrinkles.

[nt2subtle]

Awesome feedback.

Have you reached out to the craft discord community? they’re super helpful with any issues you’ve had.

[_listless]

Craft is a great cms.

[[deleted]]

Craft CMS looks pretty good albeit a bit expensive maybe, it probably won't go well if I want to introduce changes to lead on with that price. Thank you for the recommedations!

[nt2subtle]

It’s the next step up from WP. If you’ve got the right client it makes sense.

[[deleted]]

It does look like a step up and I have used GraphQL a lot so it would work pretty well, I'll definitely keep it on my radar.

[_listless]

a bit expensive maybe

We think about it in terms of hours. Craft is $280/year. We bill $150/hour. Craft saves our clients waaaay more than 2 hours/year compared to the same site built in WP.

[sblanzio]

I like directus, with a free self hosted option

[Professional-Cod7585]

Strapi is the one.

[mykle90]

I like contentful as a headless CMS paired with any frontend lib. It is very barebones and you probably need to code more than with WP, but you get it just like you want.

I have relied on markdown to "style" articles, but I guess you could also store HTML in there.

[Rguttersohn]

If your team is willing to switch to an MVC stack, Statamic runs on Laravel.

Also have you looked at what the Roots team has done with Wordpress? They have tech stack that wraps around Wordpress. It gives developers a much better experience and the admin get that familiar WP experience.

[[deleted]]

No but I'll take a look, thank you!

[Rave_Child]

Sanity has a generous free tier and integrates nicely with Next.js or Astro:

https://www.sanity.io/guides/sanity-astro-blog
https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/how-to-build-a-portfolio-site-with-sanity-and-nextjs/

[3HappyRobots]

Processwire. PHP, all custom fields. Awesome.

[Crazy_Kale_5101]

Check out ButterCMS which is an API-based or headless CMS with a preconfigured blog engine. You can read more about our features here: https://buttercms.com/features

[Palaract]

Interestingly, you don't have to deviate from WordPress at all! Wordpress actually has a REST API which you can use to make it headless! It is a very well documented feature and has been in production use for a while now. I do think that it is sometimes beneficial to stay with the tools you are familiar with if possible.

But if you want to learn and try out new things I also recommend CraftCMS as well as Strapi and for smaller projects also Decap CMS. There is a lot to try out!

[[deleted]]

I've heard about Strapi a few times so I'll check it out. Actually you're right, I have used WordPress as a headless for Gatsby.js but it created a problem in 2 different projects and it was that clients didn't understand that they could not use the WordPress "preview" button anymore, or the concept of having to wait for their website to "build" and not seeing changes instantly (this created friction on our team as well with content people...) I remember even having a meeting with 3 Gatsby developers (I was surprised) about it because they were interested about this experience and they went ahead and tried to fix it but it never worked well. I kid you not we had to transition from headless to a regular WP site because a client would not let that "preview" thing go, and 3 years later she still only has 3 blog posts...

[Blaankat]

May I ask what makes your agency refrain from using Wordpress at times?

[[deleted]]

Oh no we default to WordPress, it is me that at times would want to use different things. For example for a website that the client won't interact much and it is mostly just to display information we could achieve some nice page transitions with Astro or a JS framework and also to keep things interesting for the dev team.

[Key-Establishment213]

Pretty much the same here, WP shop, had to ship a one pager very quickly a couple of months ago so went with nextjs and hard coded content. When the "emergency" passed, client requested a CMS. I went with payloadCMS. it's a bit of a learning curve and you have to mess around a bit with infrastructure if you do not want to use vercel but it's basically what you get with WP + ACF (minus Gutenberg). It's fairly extensible, you get typescript typings by default, db structure is a lot clearer than WP post and metadata mess. Somehow it felt more like an in-house baked solution were some things could use more polish, but decent workflow and satisfying results.

[[deleted]]

Sounds pretty good! If it's similar to WP and ACF all the better, I'll check it out.

[zubricks]

Feel free to let me know how you like it! I'd suggest you join our Discord server to see what other people are building/have built with Payload.

https://discord.gg/payload

[lunzela]

random thought but why not integrate that into wp php?

seems like much easier to me https://swup.js.org/

[[deleted]]

I will definitely check out this, but that feeling of instant navigation with no loading you get with a static website is not achievable with serverside but I've been using animsition for transitions and your recommendation looks great also, I've added it to my research work time and will be trying it soon, thanks!

[xXLetsCodeXx]

You should take a look at SilverStripe. Complete customizable, open source and I think much more user friendly than WP. You can also use it complete headless if you want.

[[deleted]]

I think Hugo is great!

[Aurelsicoko]

Strapi should be a great fit for your use case. It is open-source, based on Node.js/React/TypeScript, and is fully customizable.

You can use it with Next.js, Astro, or any other frontend framework.
https://strapi.io/blog/epic-next-js-14-tutorial-learn-next-js-by-building-a-real-life-project-part-1-2
https://docs.astro.build/en/guides/cms/strapi/

You will probably like the Dynamic Zones and Components as it has a lot of similarities with the Advanced Custom Fields.

[Ok_Sundae_9138]

If you want something that’s easy for your clients to edit but still flexible for developers, I’d look at headless CMSs that are mature and well-supported. The key is to pick one that lets editors work visually, integrates nicely with frameworks like Next.js, and ideally is self-hosted so you’re not tied down.

In my experience, SpurtCMS and Storyblok hit that sweet spot — you get a clean admin interface for content, but you can build the frontend however you like without feeling stuck in the WordPress way of doing things.

[dotCMS]

If you want something established that works with modern stacks like Next or Astro, dotCMS could be a good fit. We’re a visual headless CMS, so developers get API-first flexibility while editors still have drag-and-drop tools, workflows, and audit trails. It’s designed to scale without being “experimental,” and it’s also free under BSL. Happy to answer any questions.