“Netlify CMS is an open source content management system for your Git workflow that enables you to provide editors with a friendly UI and intuitive workflows”. Note that it’s entirely orthogonal to the Netlify hosting platform - using one doesn’t commit you to the other, but there’s definitely some convenience factor from using both together.

I just added it to this blog and I really like it!

I love static site generators - I’m glad that I own my own content, that the output is simple to host, that everything is version controlled, etc.

However I definitely hit what the authors call “a gap in the static site generation pipeline”. I’m perfectly happy to hand-write Markdown in Vim, commit, push, PR, and merge - that’s my ideal workflow for so many things. For my blog though, there’s relatively little editing post-publish, only one author, and one of my core goals is to minimise friction. And Netlify CMS helps a lot with that.

The process was pretty straightforward:

1. Copy the static HTML page
2. Copy the example YAML config
3. Fiddle a bit with the YAML to get all the post fields I want
4. Enable publish_mode: editorial_workflow because I want GitHub Pull Requests so my tests can run first etc.
5. Set up Netlify GitHub authentication

The authentication was the most fiddly bit - almost certainly made easier by me using Netlify for hosting, but ultimately not especially challenging.

And now I can go edit and create posts via a nice web UI on top of the GitHub repository.

So far so good - I wrote this post in it!