(Visual) CMS for Jekyll
Published 2017-06-22, 12:20
Jekyll is „a blog-aware, static site generator in Ruby“. It also is used by Github Pages, which means you can host simple static sites, managed via Git, for free with it. That’s great.
Not that great (for me) is that you have to manage the content in the file system and manually handle Markdown files. That’s why there are multiple visual, hosted CMS for Jekyll.
I looked at some of them:
- Siteleaf is a nice hosted application that offers a structured view of your Jekyll files. Collections get their own navigation entries, the Markdown editor is decent (although
superpretty small with no fullscreen or „show the relevant stuff only“ option), even their visual editor (beta) doesn’t seem to bad.
Unfortunately it is unusable for me as it messes with the front matter (resorts the entries) and _config.yml (also resorts and removes all comments) the moment you add the repository to siteleaf. Boo!Their collection view also doesn’t understand sub-folders and just ignores them.
The free plan is limited to 100 pages.
- Forestry does the same things as Siteleaf, but a lot better. Collections get their navigation, show the subfolders, front matter and config files stay untouched. The markdown and WYSIWYG editors are… okayish. Markdown view has a few strange bugs and although WYSIWYG is a great preview, using it to edit can break stuff quite fast. Switching between the two also can cause loss of data. Again the real editor is much too small, no fullscreen or „writing mode“ view – I don’t understand why this is not the focus.
Their team is very responsive via Intercom and also seems to fix bugs quite frequently. Let’s hope they continue doing so, then this could get pretty nice.
- cloudcannon is a different beast – it actually manages to make your rendered pages editable in their „Visual Editor“. Unfortunately advanced stuff like Automated „Table of Contents“ Generation of kramdown gets overwritten by this. The „Content Editor“ (WYSIWYG without my design) has the same problem and the „Source Editor“ is very sourcy and feels more like an programming IDE.Besides that the Editors are awesome, really great work from the team. You can hide all the UI to make a very focused write environment and everything seems very well thought out.
- Prose has no visual editor, no „structured“ view of the file system – but it just works. You can edit files, preview the Markdown, commit it to Github. The editor view is very clean and simple which makes for a great full screen experience. Before saving you also have a „diff“ view, that – although a bit rudimentary – gives a great overview of the changes you (accidentally?) created.
Although hosted on prose.io, Prose is also open source (since 2012!) and can be hosted on your own server. The instance on prose.io is great though, and you can (ab)use the Github issues as a support channel if needed. Nice people.
(A more complete list is at headlessCMS.org.)
So because of the shortcomings of Siteleaf (unusable because of messing with my data), Forestry (buggy editors) and Cloudcanon (doesn’t support advanced stuff) I am actually using Prose right now.
(Of course there also several options you can self host, but as that kind of defeats the purpose to go to a Github Pages hosted static site – now I have o host the CMS myself – I skipped those. Still, some links: MeetHyde, jekyll-admin)
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