An evaluation of NetlifyCMS
Netlify is doing a really great job with their hosting and build platform - specially for JAMstack addictive persons like me.
With NetlifyCMS they brought an idea to code, which for sure other developers had before as well - using git as content repository.
The benefits are clear: perfect version management incl. branching, hostory record, comments, discussion on changes and so on. And permission management is covered as well. As long as you are able to manage most of the contents in a text based format e.g as markdown.
While we thought the git approach is great, markdown is an option and NetlifyCMS is open source as well, we did an evaluation to check if we could use it for client projects.
The results as a short overview.
Pro:
- Bullet proofed git approach.
- The user interface is minimalistic and clean.
- Basic text editing, versioning and content preview works just fine.
- Simple data models and content type attributes can be setup quite easy.
- The decision how to render the final website is not predefined and so NetlifyCMS is open for different implementation approaches, what we really liked.
Cons:
- The usage of the CMS is depressing slow - maybe because the GitHub API is not made for instant requests?
- Creating more complex data models - specially relations - was in fact not possible in a usable way.
- The question of asset management is kept more or less open. An approach could be to integrate Cloudinary, but therefore some effort is needed.
- Editors would need GitHub accounts, which might make some non-tech people feel uncomfortable.
As overall result, we see no way to bring NetlifyCMS into client projects. At least not for now. While development at the code is going fast, this might change in the future.
Good luck.