Show HN: I made a CMS that uses Git to store your data (outstatic.com)

You're right. What I meant is, you don't need a third-party CMS provider. I suck at writing copy.

Some people have been using Outstatic without Vercel, and there's a section in the FAQs about it. But since this is the first version of the library and I haven't tested it with other services, I felt putting Vercel as a requirement would avoid people running into pitfalls with other services.

But oAuth is only setup with Github for now. So unfortunately that's pretty much a requirement.

I plan on adding support for other git providers in the future.

Probably Github itself gives stargazers updates on what they starred

Misleading users for GitHub stars... that's a paddling!

Maybe it's like the YouTube Like and Subscribe, except for the part where they contact you for new releases. It's a lot less pushy to tell people to star your repo than asking them to subscribe to issues and become a contributor on equal footing.

You need something like "stars" or "project member" as part of your contributor ladder.

Did you know that YouTube channels cannot get a non-randomized URL or be searchable by the channel title unless you have 1000 subs? (How do you get 1000 subs when nobody can search for or find your channel unless you hand them a link? I guess by pounding pavement...)

As an OSS maintainer, I don't think that stars do anything except for number go up, but you'd be surprised the things that "number go up" can help with.

YMMV, but the “For You (beta)” tab on GitHub shows releases on repos I've starred (but not followed). The “Following” tab does not.

The For you feed [1] (currently in beta) supposedly does that, one of the things it will populate with is, updates about your starred repos.

[1]https://docs.github.com/en/account-and-profile/setting-up-an...

Honestly, I'm not entirely sure how it works but on my Github feed I think I get updates from products I star. This is my first open source project and I saw some other popular projects doing it. I'm basically using it to measure interest in the idea/project so that I can decide to pursue working on it publicly or just keep it for myself.

Awesome, let me know how it goes!

Ever used fossil? https://www2.fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki

Thank you! I really appreciate it :)

Mainly client side. Some functions go through next's api folder.

You can build your frontend as you wish. It is still very early so previews are not yet a thing.

I totally disagree. Git is a great way to store documentation. Also „Git“ and „Wiki“ are not opposites. You can have a wiki AND store content in git at the same time.

NetlifyCMS is abandoned?

> Netlify CMS has been the best solution in this space, and despite many thousands of stars it’s abandoned now.

I've noticed this too (https://github.com/netlify/netlify-cms/releases) with lots of open issues which makes me very nervous about using it for client projects. Netlify CMS is more than good enough for solo and small sites but it feels like it never took off like it should even with the backing of Netlify. Netlify's recent pricing changes to their hosting where they charge per Git user who trigger commits isn't great here either.

> Why are there not more alternatives?

Maybe it's hard to make money from? There's quite a few commercial offerings where some try to offer a slice of it as open source.

I'd love an active open source alternative to WordPress with a basic site builder i.e. you can drag and drop pre-built page sections to create new pages and get a live preview before you deploy. Unfortunately, WordPress is still the safe open source choice for ease-of-use of the editors for basic business sites.

Wordpress dominates the space, despite its record of security issues.

UX is the hardest thing. Drag and drop sucks IMO. Nothing that non-technical folks actually love, mostly be forced to use what orgs bought. for data entry, nothing beats spreadsheet .. I'm crying.

For the PHP folks there are a few options.

Ones that I've used include:

- Statamic https://statamic.com

- Jigsaw https://jigsaw.tighten.com/

For anyone wanting to dig deeper, I think the term "flat file CMS" has been coined quite a while ago (and is what the author is aiming at with the Git-based flow). I'd agree that "lack of options for (accessible) visual editing UIs" is true, while flat-file-, database- or API-powered (which in the end is a wrapper over a DB, usually) CMS seem to exist for any reasonably popular programming language - with different levels of maintenance/recent development happening, granted.

When I started building Outstatic I haven't had heard about Netlify CMS, Tina CMS, nor any other alternatives... thought I was being original with the idea of a UI to manage .md files on Git lol

After I've launched people pointed the existence of those CMSs. I really built this as something to scratch my own itch, halfway through I decided it could be a library.

But as someone else mentioned, it's quite hard to think of a business model around this. I'll keep working on it just so that I can use it in my own blog. If other people want to use it, that's great.

I wonder how people deal with a situation where they build a platform like this and it gets adopted by e.g. political group opposing current regime in their country. A friend of mind built a pretty nice platform, until these groups started using it. He just didn't want to end up in the ditch somewhere so he closed the platform. The money from ads wouldn't even pay for servers, not to mention legal aid or hiring staff to deal with "unwanted" content. Even if you build an open source platform that anyone can self host, you can still run a risk someone being upset about it, that you are making it "easy" for certain groups to spread their propaganda.

It feels like today it is a too risky water to dip toes into.

Can't believe Netlify CMS has been dropped. That was a really smart little project. For sites of a certain size (which seems to be a great number of webapps), it's an almost ideal solution. Hope any fork picks up sufficient traction.

Bugs do appear to still be tracked and tagged though, so it's a confusing state of affairs.

Crafter CMS is a git backed CMS. https://craftercms.org/

Publii [1] is still an excellent option in the Hugo-but-graphical space. It has a desktop app and allows hosting on GitHub Pages, AWS S3, Netlify or just plain old FTP.

[1] https://getpublii.com/

Because it is not much simpler than just git + the editor of your choice for developers, and it is still harder to use than Wordpress for non-developers.

Agreed. I built https://sitepress.cc/ that uses git + files to manage content in Rails, but it needs an editor.

I’m not sure if the right thing to do is build a web editor or smooth out git workflows so that non-technical people can open content files with desktop software to make changes to the content.

Pardon my ignorance, but i've recently been trying to decide on a cms service and it seems like there are too many options (strapi, prismic, contentful, ghost, cockpit, forestry, etc...) What am i missing here?

Hey, Thanks for trying it out!

Yes, at this stage I wouldn't advise anyone to try using this in production, it's the first version of a side project after all. But I'm really surprised by the response so far. I'll definitely keep improving it.

Let me know if you manage to figure out what went wrong, and if you get any error messages/logs. I'm available on twitter @AndreVitorio

Can you speak a bit more as to how you are extracting the data from Apple Notes / iCloud into next?

What makes JavaScript such a terrible fit compared to the other 100 languages you have in mind?

> Git is not a data store but a version control system, it can't store data. Data is stored on your disk

By the same theory, you don't store data in MySQL, you store it on a disk.

This is so unbelievably wrong.

Git absolutely is a data store. It just so happens that its primary use-case is version-controlled code.

There's no reason why it can't be other data - even binary. Other text that isn't code is absolutely fine.

Also, if it's in GitHub, it's almost certainly is using Git. Though I haven't tried this service out yet, my guess is GitHub is being used as a known central Git repo source with a reasonably well developed ecosystem and security mechanics as well as being the most widely adopted Git VCS platform on the market.

But in theory you could use any Git repo on any platform (or no platform)... it sounds like it will just need to end up on GitHub currently to make use of the orchestration this service provides.