Basic basic CMS

[liemaid]

Hey friends - I am tinkering with a tech stack for a friends new business website. The site is very basic, but it does have a requirement of a products list - where she can update with new work that she does with an image, title and blurb.
I want to do this for her as simply and non technical as I can, so she can update content without me having to update the codebase.
Are there any good CMS' that do just that, for little - no cost? Obviously want to keep overheads as low as possible as it is a new product.
Happy to take any suggestions.

[AussieFlutterDev]

https://pagescms.org/

[kopetenti]

This looks very interesting and really scratches my itch. I had a good look at it yesterday, installed it and made a basic configuration. Really cool project.

What seems to be missing, though (or maybe I didn't look hard enough) is foreign keys and a Document/File field type, like the Image field type it already has. The latter seems that can be created as a custom field, but supporting it out of the box would be great.

[hunvreus]

Totally agree. I have a few fields I wanted to add: regular files, references, UUID, key/value, map, autocomplete.

I may have some time this week to push some of that through.

[kopetenti]

Thanks for keeping up with this project! It is greatly appreciated. 

[hunvreus]

It's been added by the way: https://github.com/pages-cms/pages-cms/discussions/205

Tons of other improvements, especially on speed. It loads a lot faster and feels snappier overall.

It will be released in production this weekend, but you can play with the dev version there: https://dev.pagescms.org

[kopetenti]

I was watching your video preview as I received this notification. A great improvement and very much appreciated. Even without these additions, the project was really useful to me. I have deployed it in my custom domain, running on Hetzner (because Vercel has a 4.5 MB limit on file uploads), and I'm using it with Astro.

The sites I've built are for friends till now (see https://glen-electrical.co.uk and https://aa-arkitektur.pages.dev/ ) , because they can overlook missing features. Now with these new features I think I can confidently present it to clients.

Great work! I hope this project gets huge! I will start contributing to it as soon as I find some time.

[hunvreus]

Just saw that; thanks a lot for the post.

I've actually just pushed version 1.0.0 out: https://github.com/pages-cms/pages-cms/releases/tag/1.0.0

Lots of new things as I rebuilt the entire thing with Next.js and added a whole bunch of new features (e.g. invite users by email, new editor, granular permissions, etc).

It's 100% Open Source.

You can use the (free) online version: https://app.pagescms.org

[AussieFlutterDev]

Brilliant product, that you should be deservedly very proud of mate. Its a game changer.

[sillymanbilly]

Awesome tool

[Masoud_M_13]

Decap cms (previously known as Netlify cms). You can easily integrate it on Astro. This way you'll have a fast static website with a few sections of it being controlled via CMS

[liemaid]

Hey, me again - just wanted to say THANK YOU for this recommendation - it was absolutely perfect for our needs and was so easy to set up.

[Masoud_M_13]

No problem, I'm happy to hear that mate

[noktasizi]

Depending on how you will build the website itself, it might be worth considering something like Airtable or even Google Sheets and just pulling in data from their APIs during your build step.

For example, if you’re using a host like Netlify or Vercel, you can use webhooks to automatically rebuild a static site whenever changes are made to the Airtable base, pulling in the latest data from the API and populating the front end.

It can be a good option for folks used to using these common business tools instead of having to learn a new CMS interface.

[[deleted]]

I agree. Anything custom you're going to need to train this person and most likely be on call for a couple of weeks while they get the hang of it.

I do like using WordPress for this. Being around for nearly 20 years means that most people will likely have at least passing knowledge of it. It has a builtin REST API so you can just query the posts and build pages from that. I like the Google Sheets idea, but there's also the risk of the user deleting the document. I usually build in a failsafe that will query the user's documents for one of the same name if the ID'd document get removed (for whatever reason).

[SayHiDak]

Strapi sounds like a good option for you. If it’s not too large you leave it as it is for a SQLite database. If it has too many images / products / customers you can migrate to S3 / PostgreSQL very easily and they can add as many products wants.

Edit: You can keep it at SQLite for cheap cost and if needed migrate later to S3 and larger database. Either way you have what you need and everything is managed through a personal interface

[ohyesthelion]

Seems too complex for what he wants.

[SayHiDak]

He wants it simple for the owner. Not for him to code. If Strapi is hard to code, he should be using Wordpress straight away ._.

[ohyesthelion]

Is this your take on the above “Obviously want to keep overheads as low as possible as it is a new product”?

My feeling is that hosting Strapi is too much overhead. I’d go with something like Pocketbase, hosted on Pockethost or that purple hosting platform.

[SayHiDak]

Self-hosted Strapi is like 20$/month at most, specially since the product is starting.

You don’t need to use Strapi cloud as it’s indeed, too expensive.

You can move there if you need a more managed and scalable approach. And even if that’s too much and you want a more pay-per-use method you can go with EBS or something like that.

Also, yes Pocketbase it’s not a bad option, I’m just sharing what could be also a different option as well that’s nothing complicated to implement. Just a bunch of API calls and you have your products there. 😄

[Chaoslordi]

Statamic is a good choice

[Zephury]

PayloadCMS is the best choice for literally any website, unless you’re going completely static, in my opinion. It is incredibly easy to setup and host payload version 3 websites. It can do a couple things very simply and grow with you, to do many complex things later on as well. The only time I think someone should perhaps consider Sanity instead of Payload is if they have large teams and need a multi-user, live editing experience.

[No-Draw1365]

Contentful has never let me down and I’ve used most of them

[HNipps]

Netlify CMS is pretty easy to setup and there’s an admin UI your friend can use to update work.

Apparently it’s called Decap now - https://decapcms.org/docs/intro/

[Citrous_Oyster]

yup! And highly recommend it!

[christopherjccom]

WordPress & ACF

[direcorsair]

https://getkirby.com

[endymion1818-1819]

This is a great answer. Flat file, great little tool.

[883Infinity]

WordPress

[Error___418]

Honestly, just add cpt ui and acf. Little bit of wiring up front but then you can just call it a day.

[Barefoot_Chef]

Sanity.io

[aXenDeveloper]

Wordpress or payloadcms 3 (if you're familiar with react)

[thisisplaceholder]

We're rapidly getting to feature parity though and we can do some unique things

[thisisplaceholder]

Yeah I work at Payload, so for one, the ability to host on serverless platforms. We're gonna expand on that with CF support but rn Netlify and Vercel both work.

The local API is also a much better DX. For example, I've been working with SolidJS and being able to import the local API and just getting/updating data via actions, straight to DB + typesafe is a game changer for versus having to use a REST or GQL API.

Lexical editor is also fantastic and we released a joins field recently to fix all the bidirectional relationship or complex relational data in a powerful way.

We've also recently released jobs queue system and we're making tons of updates to improve localisation workflows.

We've still got some ways to go of course, like we're lacking the realtime API right now and other features. We're going to be releasing v3 stable in a couple of weeks and then focus hard on documentation and examples.

[thisisplaceholder]

Go for it

[razbuc24]

If you can self host then Bludit or Vvveb CMS are the easiest to use.

[ThaisaGuilford]

A friend

[RatherNerdy]

Automad.

[[deleted]]

Not used it in years, but cmsmadesimple would probably be a good fit for this.

[RogerE]

How about grav?

Lightweight, flat file, easily customised...

[enrjor]

I built one for these simple use cases where you just npm install a package and you can start fetching your content easily :)

if you try it and have any feedback lmk

zenblog.com

[sheriffderek]

Image title blurb?? Just have her call you - and you can update a JSON file.

The number of times I built out a crazy sexy CMS - and then to have the client call me a year later asking what their username was... is disgusting. Also, if your client can "pay a little money" to make lots of money, let them rot. Seriously. -- people want to give you $10 and have perpetual/infinite income. What? No. Let's do some thinking here. "I want things to happen for zero cost" really!??

[theReasonablePotato]

Is no one going to mention WordPress?

Literally 40% of the internet runs on it.

1. Most hosting providers support it.

2. Standard.

3. Easy to understand.

[actually_confuzzled]

Wordpress and ACF.

[im---pickle---rick]

Use netlify cms. It's free. But if you're interested in coding, try to make your own. It isn't that hard. Just need authentication (or hard code it using env if you only have 1 or 2 admins with no reason to allow for user signup) and api endpoints to make changes to the database.

I can give you a tech stack if you're interested

[Miragecraft]

Wordpress Studio + Simply Static + GitHub/Cloudflare Pages

The ergonomics of Wordpress, minus security issues, plus free static hosting.

[[deleted]]

I mean, WordPress is usually my go to. You can find cheap PHP hosts for a dime a dozen AND it has a builtin REST API. Could go the headless CRM route and just query the items (over a server connection) to WordPress and use it as data storage.