Netlify CMS for better content management?

[XertroV]

Netlify (which we use for hosting the main site already) has a CMS for static sites https://www.netlifycms.org/

Managing content has been a pain point - github is too technical and other solutions haven't delivered - either due to complexity or hosting concerns, etc.

Idea:

• Use Jekyll templates from a central repo for keeping stuff looking consistent
• each branch (state, national, international) has a content specific repo that uses the main template
• host these via netlify (free if open repo)
• can use subdomains of flux.party for nice URLs
• future stuff
  • automatically allow new organisers to provision a subdomain - backend + cloudflare (via API)
  • in parallel link netlify to the repo (API)
  • unified member gateway at members.flux.party (or w/e) - static SPA
  • API at API.flux.party

[sventhebarbarian]

Hi @XertroV , this sounds like addressing the goals we had when developing the NZ site, am I correct in understanding you are not keen on the WordPress path anymore? I don't have a strong opinion which framework we develop on, I more want to develop whatever everyone else feels is best - part of me likes the idea of making our own solution rather than working on a convoluted CMS like Wordpress.

My time is pretty limited, in my projects I am not able to find time to program much any more and am paying developers to do work for me, also looking at managing freelancers effectively but doing so tentatively, I would like to see this pushed forwards for Flux NZ, if I can work out some way to deliver what you are suggesting structured in a way I agree with I would like to assist.

[XertroV]

WordPress version never got finished unfortunately :(

This could do some of that job. Full i18n needs a lot of work though. Would like to rearchitect back end as part of that. Probs using node + microservices.

We probs wont have the capacity to work on international stuff for a while without someone coming on. Can start supporting it with relatively little work (just basic stuff like gathering names) but Im cautious to do too much without a bit of reachitecting

[sventhebarbarian]

For the New Zealand side of things I am keen on a NZ specific landing site as soon as possible, a few of us have been discussing it here https://fluxvolunteers.slack.com/messages/C9H21PCET

We discussed ideas such as working on a framework that could be used by many jurisdictions, WordPress was a consideration as was working from the voteflux.org code.

Seeing your comments here @XertroV I understand you would like to use the voteflux site as the core, I like the ideas such as a base repo and standardized templates.

Do you think in the interest of expediency we could skip the re-architecting and fork what you already have? We can upgrade it later - the more activity we can drive internationally the more likelyhood we can get a wider group of programmer supporters in who could re-build things using microservices etc for us.

[XertroV]

Seeing your comments here @XertroV I understand you would like to use the voteflux site as the core, I like the ideas such as a base repo and standardized templates.

By no means am I in love with our current site or framework (jekyll has plenty of downsides + dev setup issues). But making a new site from scratch is a bunch o work.

Do you think in the interest of expediency we could skip the re-architecting and fork what you already have?

In terms of frontend I'd say just do whatever. There's nothing that needs to be common. Main thing would be membership DB stuff but we started (back in 2015) with a form that fed into a google spreadsheet. We can always import stuff later.

[sventhebarbarian]

On the NZ side thanks for the go ahead, I want to throw together the landing site, then start looking at the membership signups, see if there is any NZ specific requirements, but will probably work with a similar/same membership DB system as you already have - it may take me a little bit of time but I will keep you updated with any decisions/ideas..

[XertroV]

Sounds good - you can tack on to our membership DB if you want - I've been meaning to re-do the user part of the DB to make it way more modular anyway - this is a good opportunity.

I had a look at NZ a while ago - there are some interesting requirements - and maybe a digital signature at some point. Anyway can't quite remember but it's worth looking into before you get the membership form set up. Particularly a big headache for us was getting addresses into a nice clean format (which we now have). Happy to talk with you about that to see what we can do to make sure the data is as clean as possible.

[sventhebarbarian]

I have pretty good experience working with international addresses, for my marketplace I am developing an interesting graph structure of address dependencies and paths with customization templates per country but that is pretty full-on and solves some different problems than what we are looking at .. I will have a look onto it once I get to the membership DB side of things.