Hey friends - I am tinkering with a tech stack for a friend’s new business website. The site is very basic, but it does have a requirement of a products list - where she can update with new work that she does with an image, title, and blurb.
I want to do this for her as simply and non-technical as I can, so she can update content without me having to update the codebase.
Are there any good CMS’ that do just that, for little - no cost? Obviously want to keep overheads as low as possible as it is a new product.
Happy to take any suggestions.
This looks very interesting and really scratches my itch. I had a good look at it yesterday, installed it, and made a basic configuration. Really cool project.
What seems to be missing, though (or maybe I didn’t look hard enough) is foreign keys and a Document/File field type, like the Image field type it already has. The latter seems that can be created as a custom field, but supporting it out of the box would be great.
Decap CMS (previously known as Netlify CMS).
You can easily integrate it on Astro. This way you’ll have a fast static website with a few sections of it being controlled via CMS.
Linden said:
Decap CMS (previously known as Netlify CMS).
You can easily integrate it on Astro. This way you’ll have a fast static website with a few sections of it being controlled via CMS.
Yeah +1 for Decap! Been using it with Astro for a few client sites and it’s perfect for exactly what you described. Super lightweight, free, and the non-tech folks can handle content updates no problem. Just gives them a simple admin panel for the stuff they need to edit.
Contentful has never let me down, and I’ve used most of them.
Depending on how you will build the website itself, it might be worth considering something like Airtable or even Google Sheets and just pulling in data from their APIs during your build step.
For example, if you’re using a host like Netlify or Vercel, you can use webhooks to automatically rebuild a static site whenever changes are made to the Airtable base, pulling in the latest data from the API and populating the front end.
It can be a good option for folks used to using these common business tools instead of having to learn a new CMS interface.
Strapi sounds like a good option for you. If it’s not too large you leave it as it is for a SQLite database. If it has too many images / products / customers you can migrate to S3 / PostgreSQL very easily and they can add as many products as they want.
Edit: You can keep it at SQLite for cheap cost and if needed migrate later to S3 and a larger database. Either way you have what you need and everything is managed through a personal interface.
Sawyer said:
@Nori
Seems too complex for what he wants.
He wants it simple for the owner, not for him to code. If Strapi is hard to code, he should be using WordPress straight away.
@Nori
Is this your take on the above ‘Obviously want to keep overheads as low as possible as it is a new product’?
My feeling is that hosting Strapi is too much overhead. I’d go with something like Pocketbase, hosted on Pockethost or that purple hosting platform.
@Sawyer
Self-hosted Strapi is like 20$/month at most, especially since the product is starting.
You don’t need to use Strapi cloud as it’s indeed too expensive.
You can move there if you need a more managed and scalable approach. And even if that’s too much and you want a more pay-per-use method you can go with EBS or something similar.
Also, yes, Pocketbase it’s not a bad option, I’m just sharing what could be also a different option that’s nothing complicated to implement. Just a bunch of API calls and you have your products there. 
Netlify CMS is pretty easy to set up and there’s an admin UI your friend can use to update work.
Apparently it’s called Decap now - Overview | Decap CMS | Open-Source Content Management System
Merritt said:
Netlify CMS is pretty easy to set up and there’s an admin UI your friend can use to update work.
Apparently it’s called Decap now - Overview | Decap CMS | Open-Source Content Management System
yup! And highly recommend it!
Merritt said:
Netlify CMS is pretty easy to set up and there’s an admin UI your friend can use to update work.
Apparently it’s called Decap now - Overview | Decap CMS | Open-Source Content Management System
For developers yes. For anything else no.
Zyler said:
WordPress.
Honestly, just add CPT UI and ACF. Little bit of wiring up front but then you can just call it a day.
If you can self-host, then Bludit or Vvveb CMS are the easiest to use.
Not used it in years, but CMS Made Simple would probably be a good fit for this.
WordPress Studio + Simply Static + GitHub/Cloudflare Pages.
The ergonomics of WordPress, minus security issues, plus free static hosting.