from Hacker News

Trying out TinaCMS

by sgallant on 10/23/23, 5:11 PM with 35 comments

• by cassidoo on 10/23/23, 7:40 PM

  Oh hey that's me! Lmk if y'all have questions. I've been happy with Tina so far.

• by jauntywundrkind on 10/23/23, 6:03 PM

  Just started looking, & really like this TinaCMS, from what I've seen of the docs.

  Semi-headless, Git-backed, so each change goes into a commit. MDX, so you can have a mix of markdown and more complex content (buttons, or more complex components).

  Not a massive fan of graphql per se, but there's a very interesting graphql layer for querying your content. One can define schemas for content, and TinaCMS seems to be able to generate fairly rich data ways to query & search your data.

  Some of the advanced features are powered by a level.js compatible store, which was the popular interface for data stores on node & js for a while. The content is still git filesystem backed, so one can just throw out the store & rebuild it, but the store makes it fast to query versus having to reread the filesystem each time. Neat.

  The point of this article came down to this observation, which rings true to me. I idealize this model where we have outbrains we can file thoughts & data into, and this seems like a great tool for starting:

  > something that Chris Coyier said in his segment stuck with me when he talked about his consistency: the fact that he can just type into a CMS and hit send, with minimal things getting in his way, has kept him more consistent in his writing. I do prefer Markdown and my usual local-first workflow, but the fact that I could spit out a blog quickly without any sort of copying and pasting or editing is something I’m excited to try.

• by jmduke on 10/23/23, 6:22 PM

  If you're interested in similar approaches to the space, I've been slowly migrating some of my blog content + structured data onto Keystatic (https://keystatic.com/). Very similar philosophy; used structured flat data, backed by Git, but with an admin interface.

• by nkko on 10/23/23, 7:49 PM

  I've loved Forestry as it was just enough. Tina is a bit more complex but still great. I've migrated some sites to Netlify CMS when they've depreciated Forestry only to have Netlify spin out the CMS as Decap (horrible name) which was on ice for some time. Why can't we have nice and simple things anymore? Constant escalation of complexity is just tiresome.

• by bizzleDawg on 10/23/23, 6:45 PM

  It's on my to-do list for some time to try out editing my jeykll based blog in obsidian directly - especially with obsidian properties editor now being available ("properties" being yaml based front matter).

  Then it's just a git commit away from publishing. You could probably even just use git sync from obsidian if you're disciplined with the published flag

• by PaulWaldman on 10/23/23, 7:36 PM

  Although it consumes markdown, TinaCMS does seem to require a "Data Layer" for self-hosting. [1]

  It can be hosted serverless but needs an instance of MongoDB[2]. This detracts a bit from other SSG that simply compile markdown into HTML, JS, and CSS.

  [1] https://tina.io/docs/reference/content-api/data-layer/ [2] https://tina.io/blog/self-hosted-datalayer/

• by mediumsmart on 10/24/23, 4:47 AM

  The most frictionless I got is typing M-x blogsometing RET which puts me in an article tag below a current timestamp line inside p tags above a random em fortune line. I type the text, link any images by typing putsomeimagehere which expands to img class=“blog image” for me to fill the name before the .webp where point is, save the index.html, switch to the vterm buffer, type M-x pushthisup RET which rsyncs all changes to the server and that’s it and I still smoothly forget to blog every other day, but hey:

  blessed be the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving evidence of the fact

• by jmacd on 10/23/23, 9:06 PM

  I had a blog/changelog running for https://tier.run/blog and we just went live with Tina this week. Previously we were just writing md. It’s really nice and Tina Cloud makes adding authors etc really straightforward.

• by chucky_z on 10/23/23, 8:15 PM

  Not related to tech at all; tina.io brings me joy with it's marketing. It's all a direct reference to Napoleon Dynamite which still makes me smile when I think about it.

  I will be trying it out solely based on this first impression. :)

• by minimaxir on 10/23/23, 6:29 PM

  Hugo (https://gohugo.io/) nowadays is a good Markdown-based CMS with the right theme, and you can host it for free on GitHub Pages, with a GitHub Action to deploy to GitHub Pages on commit.

  Here's the source code for my blog with utilizes that workflow, which could publish a post live just from uploading a single Markdown file: https://github.com/minimaxir/minimaxir.github.io

• by thomgo on 10/24/23, 1:07 AM

  I've been trying to build a tool that solves that niche problemset of facilitating the edit flow of a dev blog.

  I liked Forestry, but wanted something that was embedded directly into my website, so I built Penmark CMS https://penmark.appsinprogress.com/. Inspired by utteranc.es, it uses the GitHub API to make edits directly to your repo. It's definitely a simple CMS but I'm liking it to write for my own blog!

• by esher on 10/23/23, 7:21 PM

  For reference also in the space of 'website from markdown':

  * https://content.nuxt.com/ - JS, SSG and SSR * https://www.11ty.dev/ - JS, ?? * https://getkirby.com/ - PHP * https://statamic.com/ - PHP also static export and database

• by fullofdev on 10/24/23, 1:57 AM

  I really like TinaCMS as well. The only things I'm struggling with is applying a 3rd party image hosting provider like UploadCare.

• by dottedmag on 10/24/23, 5:55 AM

  Oh, content management system, not color management system.