Re: Fwd: Modelling a web CMS in Postgres ... a little advice needed

On Thu, 11 Aug 2022 at 12:00, Laura Smith <
n5d9xq3ti233xiyif2vp(at)protonmail(dot)ch> wrote:

> Hi Tony
>
> The reason I'm looking to do it from scratch is that its a case of "once
> bitten, twice shy".
>
> This CMS will be replacing a Joomla based CMS.
>
> I can't quite say I'm enamoured by the option of trading one "baggage
> included" opinionated CMS for another. Also in this day and age, removing
> the excess baggage means an improved security footprint.
>
>
>
Laura, fair enough.

At the time i used a static site generator (SSG), which was Jekyll at the
time, to generate our website.
I could have used Joomla or Wordpress as the CMS, but these are terrible
solutions as you mentioned, as they are not designed as pure CMS engines,
especially for use with a static site generator.

I went with my own rolled CMS as well.

One part of my requirement was for a product sales database, which ended up
being a lot more complex than your design, as I needed categories, product
groups, products, prices by area and more. I did this in Postgresql, and
pulled the data via a GraphQL API implemented via Postgraphile, which
generates a GraphQL API from a Postgres schema automagically.

The other part was for the static web pages. What I came up with was to
store pages and then a set of tags where I could assign content to each tag
for the page.
For example, you talked about Page Headers and PageMainLeft. I stored
these tagged with the name of the page, and the tag name, plus the content.

The SSG then saw the tags in the HTML page template, and pulled in the
content via Postgraphile.

At the time I looked at several 'headless' CMS engines, and Strapi came
close to meeting requirements, but was still in early development stages.

Today, I would look at a different route, likely leveraging something like
Strapi. I *may* still consider using native Postgres tables to manage the
product database, but there are a lot of other proven CMS options on the
market now without the baggage of Joomla, Wordpress et al.
Node.js I regard as a necessary evil if you are developing relatively
complex websites, integrating multiple APIs and other resources.

Very much depends on your environment though.
For example, one huge advantage of the headless CMS options is that the
whole user management and access is built in if you have a large user base
maintaining different parts of the website content. Another is things like
formal APIs to get content, and access management / security of the content
itself.

There isn't really a one-solution-fits-all-requirements option when it
comes to content management, unfortunately.

Regards