Ask HN: CMS for static pages on a React website?

4 points by bchelli 6 years ago | 10 comments

Hello,

I'm looking for a tool or a service that will allow a marketing team or a product team to add static pages to an existing site built in React. I have two use cases:

1. Lead generation, creating custom pages for different type of customers with forms to get in contact with our Sales team

2. SEO, creating content on our site

Ideally I'm looking for solution type WebFlow that a non-technical person can interact with but embedded on an existing site.

Thanks for the help,

romanovcode 6 years ago |

Best thing you can do is proxy pass a path of your website to some CMS, however when your CMS will have to execute CTAs on your SPA, good luck with that.

Worst thing you can do is allow HTML fields in your Headless CMS and pass it through in your SPA but it is like going back to 90s way of doing content.

SPA is not a good case for this type of website. What you need is WordPress. This problem cannot get solved with Headless CMS.

bchelli 6 years ago | |

Thanks @romanovcode!

This is indeed hard/impossible to implement this routing logic on a SPA... Also I would lose common header, footer and style in general.

I think this is why most people are using a blog.xxxx.tld with a WordPress, basically to save them the headache.

On the other side, I'm looking at SEO and I wonder if splitting my domain authority between two subdomain is the way to go.

simplecto 6 years ago |

I think you might be looking for a headless cms. Lots out there so I will link you to a directory site.

https://headlesscms.org/

I have been looking seriously at directus and strapi

bchelli 6 years ago | |

Thanks @simplecto!

I did not know about this directory. I have looked at Strapi in the past, this is indeed a great tool, but I'm looking for a tool that does not need a tech team to build the front end piece (the head) of the CMS.

Ideally, I'm looking for some kind of tool or SaaS to build content and a custom UI at the same time (WebFlow like but embedded in my site).

simplecto 6 years ago | | |

You are welcome! You might also look at Microsoft powerapps, bubble.io, or ionicframework?

kojeovo 6 years ago |

Contentful?

bchelli 6 years ago | |

Thanks @kojeovo!

Contentful, from my understanding, is a good headless CMS, but does not allow a product team or a marketing team to manage the design/layout of new pages. Basically I would still need an engineer to implement the structure of the page, create the style, etc...

comis 6 years ago | | |

Correct, Contentful is a CMS.

Question for you though: why would you want product/marketing people feebly attempting to create new pages/layouts with some tool when you could just have a React engineer code up whatever they design with ease? I mean I get it, graphic designers and business analysts are cheaper than engineers, but if it takes them 2-3x as long (or more) to do the same job are you really saving any money?