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Ask HN: Managing copy and site content?

1 points by donw ↗ HN
Hi, HN. Could use some advice here.

Whenever I work on a webapp, there always seems to be a lot of text in the frontend. Not just small things like button labels, but help text for forms, instructions, and often legal disclaimers, marketing copy, etc.

If this lives in the repository, it requires a code change and/or redeploy to update; and if not, the alternatives seem to be one of: build a shitty CMS, or throw WordPress in front of the damn thing.

All of this makes A/B testing copy optimizations a pain in the ass.

What are your go-to strategies for handling in-app sales copy, help text, and so on? Have I just missed some obvious tool that everybody knows about, except yours truly?

4 comments

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dtournemille
You should pull in basic text from the web. You can pick whatever CMS or unCMS you like, such as https://prismic.io/. There is no sense in hardcoding content into your app. I worked on the MEC.ca ecommerce iPhone app, and all non-product content is pulled dynamically from a CMS. If you only have a few pages, then you may not even need a CMS.
donw
Care to provide some more specific examples about tools that you've used?
faster
LocaleApp provides a nice UI for managing text for your front end. Once it's set up it's pretty much seamless. It was designed for localization, but you can use it with only one language to get what you're looking for, I think.
rmsaksida
For button labels, help texts, in-page instructions: use an i18n framework.

For longer texts, docs, etc: throw Wordpress (or some other CMS) in front of the damn thing. You can route whatever needs CMS functionality, say /docs, to WP, the rest to your app. If you want tight integration you can just pull the content from the WP database. If you want to get fancy, you can even install something like WP-API (https://github.com/WP-API/WP-API).