Ask HN: Looking for headless CMS recommendation

The answer isn't headless WordPress. It's WordPress.

You're building something for a volunteer community, which means at some point you'll be gone and somebody will be wondering how the heck to manage the site with this "custom" setup that they can't figure out with chatgpt or a youtube video.

Set them up for the future, not for the now. WordPress. Just WordPress.

Reference: 26+ years in hosting, 4 years in WordPress-only hosting.

mdrzn · 6 months ago

This is the only correct answer.

Wordpress, give them email and password, and a .pdf with screenshots on where to click to create a new post/page or edit stuff.

akudha · 6 months ago

I'd suggested wordpress.com, instead of self hosting. Where I work, they went with self hosting for a simple blog (we aren't doing anything fancy, just simple news/articles blog). It has been a headache as no team has the interest or time to keep it updated.

aosaigh · 6 months ago

Exactly. I don't know if they've gotten better, but I worked on a headless Contentful + Gatsby site (because the previous developers got sucked into JAMstack hype) and it was a comedic catastrophe.

It required constant developer oversight, even when only publishing one or two articles a week. Things broke all the time. Builds broke constantly. Things went wrong left right and center.

Don't do it. Give them a Wordpress site.

dizlexic · 6 months ago

I hate to agree because I hate WordPress, but when building something for others especially in a volunteer community it's still the go-to solution.

Pros, a ton of docs, easy non-technical customization, long term support, many already experienced users, made for basically exactly what you're doing.

Cons, it's WordPress, and the actual wp-loop is a nightmare of bad choices.

justinrubek · 6 months ago

In every experience I've had, non-technical people have had a terrible time doing customizations. Not a single time have I ever seen them successfully navigate customizing pages without someone else stepping in. I see this as the worst case scenario: non-technical people can't do it and technical people also can't because they only have subpar tools to do so. I disagree wholeheartedly with this assumption.

dabockster · 6 months ago

Same. Or maybe something using PHP just as a basic templating engine (like how people used to use it). Something that can be copy/pasted to a dime a dozen cPanel powered shared webhost at a moment's notice.

Dead Comment

justinrubek · 6 months ago

In my experience, wordpress is very confusing for non-technical people to navigate. It is largely not different than a "custom" setup because it's always some patched together job of various plugins to the point that it becomes brittle and difficult to work with. I get the sense that technical people think it is more straightforward and prescribe it to people, but any non-technical person I've worked with is utterly lost in it.

I don't think the LLMs change the argument either. If anything, dealing with the complexities of wordpress could make it even more difficult without someone who knows what they're doing.

Somewhere around 15 years ago, I thought wordpress was viable, but I think we need to leave it in the dust. I worked with it again 5 years ago, and the situation was no different from what I could tell.

farseer · 6 months ago

Its just a website to post community events, don't think any plugins would be required.

type0 · 6 months ago

Why not Ghost instead?

whatamidoingyo · 6 months ago

I just set Ghost up last night via the Digital Ocean droplet. The site is up, but I'm having difficulties during the sign up/subscribe process. Set up mailgun, edited the config file with credentials, but the problem persists. Hoping to get it solved this weekend when I have more time to look into it; but I definitely agree, Ghost is awesome!

michaelsalim · 6 months ago

Most people don't know Ghost. Almost everyone knows wordpress

I wouldn't be setting up a static site + headless CMS for a non-technical organization. This is basically asking for a constant headache.

Just set them up on a website builder like Webflow/Framer/Ycode/Squarespace/etc that has a CMS built in.

citizenpaul · 6 months ago

On the other hand I worked for a small place that was spending over 250k'ish per year on website maintenance to a company that setup their headless CMS website that they sold them.

They complained about it constantly but they kept paying (7 years and going when I was doing work for them which by they way they constantly tried to shortchange me). Never feel bad about taking money from a company, its just business. Setup your income stream and take care of yourself. I'm not sure why there is this bizarre self sacrificing mentality in tech to make other people rich at your own expense.

Not to mention if you invoke those companies you are putting yourself in their walled garden that makes them money and takes control of your income away from you. Why would any person want to do that? There is no moral quandary here.

gjsman-1000 · 6 months ago

> Not to mention if you invoke those companies you are putting yourself in their walled garden that makes them money and takes control of your income away from you. Why would any person want to do that? There is no moral quandary here.

Buying into proprietary software and walled gardens is ridiculously common and acceptable in a business environment. That's code for "no liability if something goes wrong, minimal maintenance, and easy onboarding of new employees."

jslaby · 6 months ago

There is some truth to this. One of the fails we had was pricing our product too low, where it was looked at as a stepping stone to something more expensive, even though it provided the same exact functionality minus the fancy looking ui. There were businesses that wanted to get out of their existing application suite, but are hooked in due to management perception and the sunk cost fallacy. The company who overpriced considerably is reaping millions per year on that application. If I could just go back in time..

skeptrune · 6 months ago

If there's a no-code way to edit content and AI can work with the rest then I think it's fine.

pembrook · 6 months ago

AI isn't going to be much help unless the customer is comfortable vibe coding in cursor and isn't too intimidated by a git/serverless workflow...but firing up an IDE like cursor and dealing with git + serverless builds is still a huuugge ask for most people who aren't in tech by trade.

Even AI assisted it's going to be rough.

It's important to remember a vast majority of people have never used their desktop computer for more than MS Office and Google Chrome (facebook/youtube) and maybe ChatGPT now (still only 34% of the US population).

Heck, dealing with a file system is already too much complexity for most of the population.

Navigating around some enterprise-y headless CMS UI is already going to be a big ask. If these volunteers are anything like the ones I've dealt with before, they're going to struggle to even get past basic auth (which email did I use? What's my password again? What the hells a password manager???)

nomoreofthat · 6 months ago

I honestly can’t tell whether this comment is satire or this site is just full of people who have no ability (or no interest) in understanding other people. You don’t need to be a psychologist or even have a good understanding of other people to recognize what a ridiculous suggestion this is. You just have to care a tiny little bit about other people. Is that really too much to expect?

Though given that the psychopath alleged-incestuous-rapist Sam Altman has been the top user on the site since literally day one I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised

geocrasher · 6 months ago

Keystatic[1] is awesome. It's local-first by default and made for static site builds, so you can keep costs low by not using a server.

I've used it alongside Astro for both my personal blog[2] and two company sites[3][4]. It's worked amazingly well each time.

[1] https://keystatic.com/

[2] https://github.com/skeptrunedev/personal-site

[3] https://github.com/devflowinc/trieve/tree/main/website

[4] https://github.com/patroninc/patron/tree/main/website

blakeburch · 6 months ago

I really enjoyed sanity.io a year ago. It had the best data structure flexibility by a mile, with the ability to have multiple user draft states and merge conflict resolution.

Other Headless CMS felt restrictive, with shared drafts or the requirement for all published items to have changes go live instantly.

Once you're set up with your schema, the UI is easy enough for non-developers (and you can customize it for them if needed).

codegeek · 6 months ago

Why headless ? If non technical admin will post details about events, you can find a WordPress plugin for it and setup a WP site. Headless makes sense if you want to really customize the experience but you want "cheapest option" so I would assume they cannot pay for customizations anyway.

kevin_thibedeau · 6 months ago

How else are they going to synergize with the latest paradigm shift?

Headless is for sharing a common backend between a web site and phone apps. If you don't have the resources for the apps then it serves little purpose.

rovr138 · 6 months ago

> Headless is for sharing a common backend between a web site and phone apps.

Or build/add an API when needed

leo_researchly · 6 months ago

We recently landed on Strapi. There’s an open source version but we use the hosted one (for now). All in all good. There are a few quirks in the UI (sometimes smaller changes weren’t saved - although this might be a user issue from my side) and the markdown editor could be more user friendly.

We are sticking with it for now because it’s indeed good enough and I haven’t found any better options (give the price).

mkranjec · 6 months ago

IIRC Strapi is a great option for green field projects. C/p from their docs:

"Strapi applications are not meant to be connected to a pre-existing database, not created by a Strapi application, nor connected to a Strapi v3 database. The Strapi team will not support such attempts. Attempting to connect to an unsupported database may, and most likely will, result in lost data."

Unfortunately, most of the time I do not have such luxury. What are the CMS options for pre-existing databases?

mierz00 · 6 months ago

I’m curious as to why you need to use a pre-existing database?

Can you run some migration scripts to port the old database content into a new CMS?

edu · 6 months ago

I’m building my personal blog with 11ty as a static site builder and Decap[0], previously known as Netlify CMS, to manage content.

Basically it provides a UI and all changes are pushed to GitHub which will launch the release process back in Netlify.

Seems it might fit your requirements too.

0. https://decapcms.org/

ngc6677 · 6 months ago

Also highly recommending decap CMS, or the svelte version sveltia[0]. With Gitlab backend and PKCE authorization, this CMS connects directly to gitlab without any other middleware (unlike when using Github, which will require one for the auth). With a gitlab pages + decap CMS + static site (jamstack), it is possible to have a site running at no cost. Currently having 20+ sites running this setup for clients and never hit an issue "modeling" the data as Decap config, widgets (also custom ones), can allow pretty much anything.

One downside for this setup, is that uploaded media are not re-sized or compressed (since there is no backend job doing it), so a client must be briefed into "making smaller images" (on the web client side with squoosh.app[2] for example), or using a SSG that does that built-in (hugo, gatsby)

0. https://github.com/sveltia

1. https://decapcms.org/docs/gitlab-backend/#client-side-pkce-a...

2. https://squoosh.app

Y-bar · 6 months ago

You have twenty good tips already, but nobody seems to have mentioned that you can run WordPress fully headless.

https://www.gatsbyjs.com/docs/glossary/headless-wordpress/