What CMS integrations coming?

[maphew]

The main website says CMS Integration are planned for this year. What CMS are targeted first and approximately how far out might that be?

Thanks.

[kof]

@maphew we are still deciding which CMS will integrate first. Any preferences? Regarding dates - might take us ~2 month.

[maphew]

thanks!

As for CMS preferences, something static or static adjacent, with Activity Pub integration. If language is a factor I favour python. That said, I'm not a good source of direction in CMS realm as I'm forever trying out Yet Another searching for the One That Fits Me.

[wawan1986]

I prefer to choose : https://hashnode.com/headless

[johnsicili]

I'll chime in on CMS...

I for one, want something easy to use, powerful, headache free to maintain, and affordable. I'm over managing self-hosted stuff like WordPress or Drupal. I really enjoy having a service that takes care of everything. But being an open source product, it would be nice to integrate with something that has both options as well (hosted and self-hosted).

Here are my proposals with my vote at the end:

1. Airtable – Generous free tier, super easy to use, but the big drawback is it's not a viable solution for a blog as the rich text field has very basic features (no images). Still a great solution for managing items like team members, locations, etc.
2. Strapi - looks very solid, but at $99/month, this will be a big turn off for many people (unless they self host it).
3. Sanity – looks solid, even has a free tier, but only two collections are allowed (correction: two datasets, i.e. databases) until you have to pay $99 a month. Many blogs have three collections (authors, posts, categories). Still would work for a lot of people though.
4. Statamic - open source, has a lot going for it and the pricing is a one-time $259 and then recurring $59/year for updates. Free tier won't work as the API is only available in paid.
5. CraftCMS - open source, very similar to Statamic in features and pricing. $299 one-time then $59/year for updates. They even have an R2 plugin.
6. Something Cloudflare Native - with the addition of D1, would be cool to go all in on
   Cloudflare. But I don't think anything is production ready (well duh D1 is in Alpha still so any CMS is gonna be unstable)

Here's a good list of headless CMSs

🎯For those reasons, my vote is for CraftCMS or Statamic. I can be convinced otherwise though. Both are open source so they can be self-hosted, they are relatively inexpensive if you host with them, and they are rich in features.

[adussarps]

One of the best CMS I ever tested is Directus, their tech stack is really mature.

[kof]

definitely going to be a CMS integration, so builder itself stays agnostic

[johnsicili]

Correction to a statement in my list: Sanity allows for two datasets not collections as I thought. So really a dataset is a database and collections are tables. Doesn't appear to be a table limit. BUT, Sanity requires a developer to use which will ostracize many people.

[aleksb3]

Check out SonicJS https://sonicjs.com/ as it runs exclusively on Cloudflare infrastructure using Workers. I’ve tested it and the claims made are true it’s incredibly fast and smokes other options speed wise I’ve tested. It’s fairly new and lacks some desirable things out of the box.

Directus is a great option. It’s well supported with a thriving community and rather easy to use.

[wawan1986]

and the last but not least : https://hashnode.com/headless

[Ren2049]

Payload CMS (FOSS) has shaped up to be a nice WordPress alternative for agency devs and end users and looks quite promising. But it's not quite there for designers because it requires a dev environment. I think there could be an opportunity for an UI to manage this CMS from within Webstudio and make it more usable fro designers.

[Erudition]

YES PAYLOAD!
I'd recommend targeting Payload first, if not Headless WordPress.
Payload is the most flexible CMS I've seen with customizable everything in TypeScript. The backend devs can just build the CMS to whatever schema and authentication and such, and the Admin UI is generated automatically.

But it's headless! Webstudio would be the perfect complement - powerfully flexible backend, powerfully flexible frontend editor. Payload has built in GraphQL, so even without a backend running, you could allow a Webstudio project to be built according to a Payload instance's generated GraphQL schema - resulting in the ultimate freedom for frontend designers to change things while the backend changes, and neither needs permission from the other.

[iBobik]

www.Contember.com - open source framework, graphql API, easy to customize React admin frontend, living from cheap proprietary cloud and promising AI generator

No vendor-lockin strategy, like Webstudio.

[kof]

There is also a git-based cms from netlify https://v1.netlifycms.org/

[FlagstaffWeb]

@kof, I think that the netlifycms is now actually Decap. https://decapcms.org/docs/intro/ (the first paragraph)

[kof]

Tina CMS looks also great https://tina.io/pricing/

[johnsicili]

Tina looks pretty good. Awesome pricing too. Would need to play with it to fully grasp its capabilities and limitations but looks like a solid contender. Great find

[wawan1986]

I prefer to choose : https://hashnode.com/headless

[kof]

Directus https://directus.io/pricing/cloud

[tripellington]

The more I've looked into Directus, the more I like it. It looks perfect for the sort of solution we would need.

[wawan1986]

I prefer to choose : https://hashnode.com/headless

[kof]

Also what about using Notion as a CMS? It might be not the best high scale collections with thousands of items but it could be actually pretty awesome or all the smaller sites, blogs and what not. There is also an open source alternative to Notion https://www.appflowy.io/ but I am not sure if it has the same API, so might need a separate integration

[kof]

A list of site builders that work on top of notion https://www.shno.co/blog/notion-website-builders

[johnsicili]

Yeah love Notion... it already has wide adoption so users wouldn't need to pick up another tool. My current votes are for Notion and Tina.

[bitsByB]

talking about open source Notion alternative do you guys heard about Anytype.io ?

[sorec574]

Notion CMS 🤌🤌🤌

Notion Docs

[wawan1986]

I prefer to choose : https://hashnode.com/headless

[kof]

I think our criteria should be:

1. It should have a cloud and cloud pricing should have a free tier + some lower-priced tiers, under $30/m
2. Reasonable limits on the free tier, should allow for hundreds of pages and a reasonable amount of traffic and storage
3. It should be self-hostable, ideally open source
4. It should be developers-friendly, have an API
5. It should be friendly to content editors
6. Should have internationalization options

[iBobik]

See Contember
#47 (comment)

[Erudition]

Payload!

[wawan1986]

Hashnode seems match almost the criteria : https://hashnode.com/headless

[pagelift]

I think the best would be to build internal CMS (Framer Style) which would be enough for most users and Template Creators + Wordpress Plugin (this would open a huge market of Wordpress Users).

[wawan1986]

I Agree, and please check this out for that : https://hashnode.com/headless

[perezstudio]

Are there any new updates on the CMS integration?

If I had to vote for anything it would be Airtable but I would much prefer a Rest API connector with repeating element and bindable fields. Food for thought :)

[bitsByB]

yeah Airtable isn't open source, NocoDB or Baserow (GDPR Compliant) are.

[kof]

If I had to vote for anything it would be Airtable but I would much prefer a Rest API connector with repeating element and bindable fields.

That's the first thing that we are doing, which is almost ready ;)

[mywebmasteruk]

@kof I am very excited to test the new CMS integration, cant wait!

[markadrake]

If you write the first integration as an example on how to, many of us can contribute back integrations for the others. I just discovered your product today and see that it's further along than my own tool.

I'm looking to integrate this into Umbraco.

[kof]

Yeah, once we have the first integration it will be possible to create more integrations. If you want to create a cloud that would offer webstudio cloud, you would need to open source your integration with AGPL license.

[tripellington]

I'm all in favor of an open source, self-hosted solution for CMS. Headless WP would be fantastic due to the ease of management. I'll be curious about how mapping would work for things like featured image, meta title/description, and the possibility of mapping custom fields.

In my agency world I regularly meet with lots of large companies. I've seen a few of the bigger players moving to Storipress - https://storipress.com/ to make things easier on their content teams. Storipress released an integration with Webflow recently, so there may be an opportunity worth exploring and I could see the dev departments of these places being convinced to ditch webflow in favor of webstudio for all the obvious reasons.

[kof]

I agree regarding preference for oss. Wordpress was our initial choice but unfortunately the amount of things to set up with Wordpress to turn it into headless cms is a few steps too much to call it "easy". We will get there for sure over time. Right now priority is on OSS and 1-click setup + great cloud pricing.

[benoiteveillard]

Strapi is a great option, it's a really complete CMS
The cloud version started at 99$/month, quite expensive to start, but the tool is open source (hostable on Railway in one click with existing template).

Sanity is also a great option as OSS and has a cloud free plan (and only 15$/mo option to get 25K items)

[bst1n]

What about Baserow ?

[bst1n]

@kof https://baserow.io/blog/1-23-release-of-baserow

[ninoppp]

I think directus would be incredibly powerful, allowing you to build almost everything with webstudio for the frontend. When do you think first integrations should be available?

[lane711]

hey @kof thanks to @johnsicili for making me aware of WebStudio. Your project has been long overdue and looks to have a ton of potential, so congrats to how far you have already come.

I am the founder of SonicJs headless CMS, an MIT CMS also based on Cloudflare workers. One of our contributing developers is looking into an integration POC with Webstidio.

My Question is: Do you have a list of requirements that would define the ideal CMS for integration with Webstudio?

[kof]

Hey Lane,

thank you, here are some foundational things, doesn't involve specific CMS features

1. should be open source and self-hostable
2. should have a cloud service (for those who don't want to selfhost) that starts from 0 with a generous free tier, at least 1000 collection items, next pricing tier should be at ~$20-30/m and next one at ~$50-100/m - this way we don't leave non-enterprise behind
3. initial setup should not require coding or github repository (but can be added retrospectively)
4. provides a way to have login that returns a private key that can later be used to fetch the data
5. optionally the key should be obtainable manually
6. ability to define seed data so we can create a template for that integration and user can start from a working project/clonable
7. should use cache control headers correctly in all api calls so that CF worker's fetch() can cache/invalidate

[lane711]

Thanks for the reply @kof .I'm sure we'll have some questions as we work thru the integration POC but this helps give some high level context.

[lane711]

Hey Oleg, I've watched several of the videos showing Airtable, Pabbly, Zapier etc integrations. I have some ideas on CMS integration I want to see if I’m on the right track.

All of the current Webstudio integrations require the user to create a separate account on a separate tool, separate UI/UX, and to a degree duplicate their efforts - for example, creating a data schema in tool X and then having to map that scheme in Webstudio. Data management has the same issue - two separate UI/UX

If there were to be tight integration, the Webstudio user would never have to leave the Webstudio UI. They would be able to:

1. Define a data schema
2. Link that UI to the Visual repeating element
3. Show data in a grid with configurable search, paging, sorting, and filtering
4. Use data to generate pages (for example: product listing from data)
5. Allow website visitors to submit form data,inserting into the schema
6. They would get API endpoints for CRUD to integrate with other apps
7. Have the ability to create view models (reformatting the data and joining referenced data)
8. etc

Future enhancements could include full text search, versioning, workflows, sending emails/SMS, advanced integrations, etc

Questions:
Who builds the UI in Webstudio? Are you looking for a CMS that has the above abilities all exposed via an API and your team build the UI or are you looking for someone else to build the UX inside Webstudio as a plugin?

[kof]

Phase 1: just enable connecting an external CMS.
Phase 2: plugins API, with this community can create a UI or load it via iframe within webstudio and make it more seamless.

We are not looking to build one particular CMS into webstudio core, it has to stay outside to support all CMSs.

[iBobik]

The world does not need another shitty CMS (e.g. Webflow's ;-)). Let companies specialize and compete by products itself, not by ecosystems of integrated products.

[fliwatuet1900]

Please consider Drupal, it would be perfect for me to use Drupal as a headless cms or kind of "SaaS Foundation" and put Webstudio on top for the front end.
Directus would also be great, this is similar to drupal.
Either are open source and you can self host them.

[bryanbemis]

Please consider AITable.ai (https://aitable.ai/). It's the cloud-hosted (commercial) version of the open-source APITable (https://github.com/apitable/apitable). Great REST API support and self-hostable.

[kof]

that's not a cms that needs to generate pages, Data resources can be already loaded and rendered

[bryanbemis]

Interesting. The same applies to other open-source Airtable alternatives like NocoDB and Baserow, correct? So are they not being considered?

[bryanbemis]

Nevermind. I see that Airtable etc. were part of the dynamic data bindings release (REST API connections).

[kof]

They are considered already supported. We could use more templates and guides though.

[idea-garage]

How about progress of CMS integration? Want to know the schedule when we can use dynamic page generation from Supabase data, with SEO optimization. According to this, we will decide when we buy lifetime license.

[kof]

Somone sent me a link to this one, for blogs https://hashnode.com/headless

[wawan1986]

I totally agree with this CMS. It looks very modern, fast, and user-friendly. With its open-source and self-hosting options, it seems like this CMS is a perfect match for web studios. I can't wait for the integration of Hashnode CMS with Webstudio. I'm really looking forward to it!

[kof]

Today is a big day for Webstudio!

Webstudio CMS live on ProductHunt and X, please support us on both platforms! (Comments are extremely important for the algorithms!)

X https://x.com/getwebstudio/status/1792463141630067194

Product Hunt https://www.producthunt.com/posts/webstudio-cms

[kof]

Another one mentioned to me https://basehub.com