<story><title>Blog with Markdown and Git, and degrade gracefully through time</title><url>https://brandur.org/fragments/graceful-degradation-time</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jaredcwhite</author><text>There is a problem in the CMS industry. Everyone wants to build a headless CMS to power Jamstack sites—only the content itself lives in databases and the CMS is usually a proprietary SaaS. Doesn&amp;#x27;t leverage Git for content in any way.&lt;p&gt;This is deeply problematic. We should have dozens, if not hundreds of contenders for &amp;quot;the next WordPress&amp;quot; that leverage Git as a foundational aspect of content management. Instead we have a bunch of Contentful clones (no disrespect to Contentful) with REST and&amp;#x2F;or GraphQL APIs.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s bananas that if you search for Git-based CMSes you have NetlifyCMS, and…wait what? Is that all??? Forestry gets mentioned a lot because it&amp;#x27;s Git-based but that&amp;#x27;s also a proprietary SaaS. I just don&amp;#x27;t understand it. Is this a VC problem or a real blind spot for CMS entrepreneurs?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>0xbadcafebee</author><text>&amp;gt; We should have dozens, if not hundreds of contenders for &amp;quot;the next WordPress&amp;quot; that leverage Git as a foundational aspect of content management.&lt;p&gt;If you want a new CMS, give it a shot. But nobody&amp;#x27;s made a better &lt;i&gt;free&lt;/i&gt; version of Jenkins either. It&amp;#x27;s hard to do and completely unrewarding&amp;#x2F;unmonetizeable (as FOSS), which is probably why nobody has done it.&lt;p&gt;However, insisting it leverage a difficult source code version control system is artificially restricting. Start with an MVP of flat files for content and add a plugin system. Somebody will write Git support, but they&amp;#x27;ll also add other content backends. I&amp;#x27;ll bet you a million dollars that a custom SQL plugin that does version control will be preferred over Git by 99% of users. But they may wise up and use an S3 plugin instead. Or maybe all three. They&amp;#x27;ll have choices, and your project will become more useful.&lt;p&gt;Don&amp;#x27;t start your project with an artificial restriction and it will be better for it.</text></comment>
<story><title>Blog with Markdown and Git, and degrade gracefully through time</title><url>https://brandur.org/fragments/graceful-degradation-time</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jaredcwhite</author><text>There is a problem in the CMS industry. Everyone wants to build a headless CMS to power Jamstack sites—only the content itself lives in databases and the CMS is usually a proprietary SaaS. Doesn&amp;#x27;t leverage Git for content in any way.&lt;p&gt;This is deeply problematic. We should have dozens, if not hundreds of contenders for &amp;quot;the next WordPress&amp;quot; that leverage Git as a foundational aspect of content management. Instead we have a bunch of Contentful clones (no disrespect to Contentful) with REST and&amp;#x2F;or GraphQL APIs.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s bananas that if you search for Git-based CMSes you have NetlifyCMS, and…wait what? Is that all??? Forestry gets mentioned a lot because it&amp;#x27;s Git-based but that&amp;#x27;s also a proprietary SaaS. I just don&amp;#x27;t understand it. Is this a VC problem or a real blind spot for CMS entrepreneurs?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lhorie</author><text>One explanation comes from just looking from the content creator&amp;#x27;s point of view: they kinda don&amp;#x27;t care what previous iterations of the work really look like (draft-final-v5-oct27-FINAL.doc anyone?)&lt;p&gt;The things a content creator might be more interested in aren&amp;#x27;t really core git strengths: SEO, publishing schedules, editorial back-and-forth, social media, etc.</text></comment>