Alternatives to Forestry

Depends on what options and technologies you have available, and how do you deploy your website.

There are CMSs which update existing static pages through FTP: You provide access credentials, mark editable parts of your HTML in a markup, and then edit the content through the hosted CMS. I know two systems which work like that: Cushy CMS and Surreal CMS.

If the source of your site is versioned through Git (and hosted on GitHub), you have other options, like Netlify CMS, Spinal CMS, Siteleaf, Forestry, or CloudCannon. Some of these also need you to use static site generator (like 11ty, Jekyll, or Hugo).

If you have some server-side scripting support available (typically PHP) you can also consider some flat-file based, server-side systems, like Kirby CMS or Lektor, which are usually simpler to retrofit into an existing template than “traditional” CMSs (WordPress, Drupal).

Finally, you could also use a desktop-based static site generator which provides a user-friendly GUI, and then locally generates and uploads the website. For example Publii, YouDoCMS, Agit CMS.

Hi,

for my last project, my client wanted a CMS to edit basically the entire webpage. I used Netlify CMS for this, but I ran into a lot of issues. I am not sure if CMSs are just hard in general.

What matters to me is pricing (ideally free forever) and that the CMS is easy to use and SIMPLE.

Is Storyblok better than NetlifyCMS? Or should I try Contentful?

I was building a personal project that I needed to store items in a real time database. I am more comfortable with my Frontend skills than my backend so I didn't want to spend time building out anything in Ruby or Go.

I stumbled on Firebase by #Google, and it was really all I needed. It had realtime data, an area for storing file uploads and best of all for the amount of data I needed it was free!

I built out my application using tools I was familiar with, React for the framework, Redux.js to manage my state across components, and styled-components for the styling.

Now as this was a project I was just working on in my free time for fun I didn't really want to pay for hosting. I did some research and I found Netlify. I had actually seen them at #ReactRally the year before and deployed a Gatsby site to Netlify already.

Netlify was very easy to setup and link to my GitHub account you select a repo and pretty much with very little configuration you have a live site that will deploy every time you push to master.

With the selection of these tools I was able to build out my application, connect it to a realtime database, and deploy to a live environment all with $0 spent.

If you're looking to build out a small app I suggest giving these tools a go as you can get your idea out into the real world for absolutely no cost.

At FundsCorner, we are on a mission to enable fast accessible credit to India’s Kirana Stores. We are an early stage startup with an ultra small Engineering team. All the tech decisions we have made until now are based on our core philosophy: "Build usable products fast".

Based on the above fundamentals, we chose Python as our base language for all our APIs and micro-services. It is ultra easy to start with, yet provides great libraries even for the most complex of use cases. Our entire backend stack runs on Python and we cannot be more happy with it! If you are looking to deploy your API as server-less, Python provides one of the least cold start times.

We build our APIs with Flask. For backend database, our natural choice was MongoDB. It frees up our time from complex database specifications - we instead use our time in doing sensible data modelling & once we finalize the data model, we integrate it into Flask using Swagger UI. Mongo supports complex queries to cull out difficult data through aggregation framework & we have even built an internal framework called "Poetry", for aggregation queries.

Our web apps are built on Vue.js , Vuetify and vuex. Initially we debated a lot around choosing Vue.js or React , but finally settled with Vue.js, mainly because of the ease of use, fast development cycles & awesome set of libraries and utilities backing Vue.

You simply cannot go wrong with Vue.js . Great documentation, the library is ultra compact & is blazing fast. Choosing Vue.js was one of the critical decisions made, which enabled us to launch our web app in under a month (which otherwise would have taken 3 months easily). For those folks who are looking for big names, Adobe, and Alibaba and Gitlab are using Vue.

By choosing Vuetify, we saved thousands of person hours in designing the CSS files. Vuetify contains all key material components for designing a smooth User experience & it just works! It's an awesome framework. All of us at FundsCorner are now lifelong fanboys of Vue.js and Vuetify.

On the infrastructure side, all our API services and backend services are deployed as server less micro-services through Zappa. Zappa makes your life super easy by packaging everything that is required to deploy your code as AWS Lambda. We are now addicted to the single - click deploys / updates through Zappa. Try it out & you will convert!

Also, if you are using Zappa, you can greatly simplify your CI / CD pipelines. Do try it! It's just awesome! and... you will be astonished by the savings you have made on AWS bills at end of the month.

Our CI / CD pipelines are built using GitLab CI. The documentation is very good & it enables you to go from from concept to production in minimal time frame.

We use Sentry for all crash reporting and resolution. Pro tip, they do have handlers for AWS Lambda , which made our integration super easy.

All our micro-services including APIs are event-driven. Our background micro-services are message oriented & we use Amazon SQS as our message pipe. We have our own in-house workflow manager to orchestrate across micro - services.

We host our static websites on Netlify. One of the cool things about Netlify is the automated CI / CD on git push. You just do a git push to deploy! Again, it is super simple to use and it just works. We were dogmatic about going server less even on static web sites & you can go server less on Netlify in a few minutes. It's just a few clicks away.

We use Google Compute Engine, especially Google Vision for our AI experiments.

For Ops automation, we use Slack. Slack provides a super-rich API (through Slack App) through which you can weave magical automation on boring ops tasks.

Hi, I went through a comprehensive analysis - of headless/api content management systems - essentially to store content "bits" and publish them where needed (website, 3rd party sites, social media, etc.). I had considered many other solutions but ultimately chose Directus. I believe that was a good choice.

I had strongly considered Contentful, Strapi, Sanity, and hygraph. Hygraph came in #2 and contentful #3.

Ultimately I liked directus for:

(1) time in business

(2) open source

(3) integration with n8n and Pipedream

(4) pricing

(5) extensibility

Thoughts? Was this a good choice? We have many WordPress sites we're not (at least now) looking to replace with Directus, but instead to push to.

I'd love some feedback.

Hi. I am gonna build a simple app for a company to ease their work. The company is sending out pdf files to their users' email. The data is a health analysis with a lot of different health values. The app should be an MVP, where users can watch their data instead of opening a pdf file. The company should be able to fill in the data in either Firebase or Contentful database. Is Contentful or Firebase best for this solution? What is your opinion?

hello guys, I need your help. I created a website, I've been using Elementor forever, but yesterday I bought a template after I made the purchase I knew I made a mistake, cause the template was in HTML, can anyone please show me how to put this HTML template in my WordPress so it will be the face of my website, thank you in advance.

I've heard that I have the ability to write well, at times. When it flows, it flows. I decided to start blogging in 2013 on Blogger. I started a company and joined BizPark with the Microsoft Azure allotment. I created a WordPress blog and did a migration at some point. A lot happened in the time after that migration but I stopped coding and changed cities during tumultuous times that taught me many lessons concerning mental health and productivity. I eventually graduated from BizSpark and outgrew the credit allotment. That killed the WordPress blog.

I blogged about writing again on the existing Blogger blog but it didn't feel right. I looked at a few options where I wouldn't have to worry about hosting cost indefinitely and Jekyll stood out with GitHub Pages. The Importer was fairly straightforward for the existing blog posts.

Todo * Set up redirects for all posts on blogger. The URI format is different so a complete redirect wouldn't work. Although, there may be something in Jekyll that could manage the redirects. I did notice the old URLs were stored in the front matter. I'm working on a command-line Ruby gem for the current plan. * I did find some of the lost WordPress posts on archive.org that I downloaded with the waybackmachinedownloader. I think I might write an importer for that. * I still have a few Disqus comment threads to map

which of the ads platform pays better? What about PurpleAds?

Google AdSense has refused to post ads on my site.

Really can not decide which one to add. Google AdSense email say that they are ready to show ads... Taboola is on review.

As a small startup we are very conscious about picking up the tools we use to run the project. After suffering with a mess of using at the same time Trello , Slack , Telegram and what not, we arrived at a small set of tools that cover all our current needs. For product management, file sharing, team communication etc we chose Basecamp and couldn't be more happy about it. For Customer Support and Sales Intercom works amazingly well. We are using MailChimp for email marketing since over 4 years and it still covers all our needs. Then on payment side combination of Stripe and Octobat helps us to process all the payments and generate compliant invoices. On techie side we use Rollbar and GitLab (for both code and CI). For corporate email we picked G Suite. That all costs us in total around 300$ a month, which is quite okay.

When starting a new company and building a new product w/ limited engineering we chose to optimize for expertise and rapid development, landing on Rails API, w/ AngularJS on the front.

The reality is that we're building a CRUD app, so we considered going w/ vanilla Rails MVC to optimize velocity early on (it may not be sexy, but it gets the job done). Instead, we opted to split the codebase to allow for a richer front-end experience, focus on skill specificity when hiring, and give us the flexibility to be consumed by multiple clients in the future.

We also considered .NET core or Node.js for the API layer, and React on the front-end, but our experiences dealing with mature Node APIs and the rapid-fire changes that comes with state management in React-land put us off, given our level of experience with those tools.

We're using GitHub and Trello to track issues and projects, and a plethora of other tools to help the operational team, like Zapier, MailChimp, Google Drive with some basic Vue.js & HTML5 apps for smaller internal-facing web projects.

Looking for the best CRM choice for an early-stage tech company selling through product-led growth to medium and big companies. Don't know if Salesforce or HubSpot are too rigid for PGL and expensive. I also had an experience of companies outgrowing Pipedrive pretty fast

Comparing HubSpot and Freshsales, not sure which to choose. Company and contact information is shareable among tech and sales teams allowing both parties to upkeep customers' contact details. Capturing leads from social media and system assigning to sales or having the option to manual assign. Sales follow up with sales activities. Once deal, technical involve to follow up regular customer visits, support ticketing, training, remind customers to renew licenses, work on projects and etc. Require a single platform to share a calendar to understand internal team activities and customer activities.

Hi, I am working as a web developer (PHP, Laravel, AngularJS, and MySQL) with more than 8 years of experience and looking for a tech stack that pays better. I have a little bit of knowledge of Core Java. For better opportunities, Should I learn Java, Spring Boot or Python. Or should I learn Drupal, WordPress or Magento? Any guidance would be really appreciated! Thanks.

Depends on what options and technologies you have available, and how do you deploy your website.

There are CMSs which update existing static pages through FTP: You provide access credentials, mark editable parts of your HTML in a markup, and then edit the content through the hosted CMS. I know two systems which work like that: Cushy CMS and Surreal CMS.

If the source of your site is versioned through Git (and hosted on GitHub), you have other options, like Netlify CMS, Spinal CMS, Siteleaf, Forestry, or CloudCannon. Some of these also need you to use static site generator (like 11ty, Jekyll, or Hugo).

If you have some server-side scripting support available (typically PHP) you can also consider some flat-file based, server-side systems, like Kirby CMS or Lektor, which are usually simpler to retrofit into an existing template than “traditional” CMSs (WordPress, Drupal).

Finally, you could also use a desktop-based static site generator which provides a user-friendly GUI, and then locally generates and uploads the website. For example Publii, YouDoCMS, Agit CMS.