Contentful Blog

I interpret the groundswell interest in the SSG a testament the CMS does not address all the needs in the content publication pipeline. Some organizations have a focus on content creators. Others on developers. In general, the hacker mindset has an allergy towards ecosystems that remove control. The SSG is about providing a framework for the developer to assert control and regaining flexibility to deliver content independent of coding to a "system".

The CMS is a crutch. It has its place in certain organizations. But it is overkill for many use cases.

In truth, however, we shouldn't be pitting the SSG against the CMS. I believe the next leap of content creation is a mixture of both SSG and classical CMS. Check out the following links:

https://github.com/thyb/contentify
https://www.contentful.com/
https://prismic.io/

There is a convergence about to happen between "dynamic" content and the SSG. It could be called CMS as an API.

1. You sound like an advertiser.

2. When I first discovered Ghost (last year) and I heard it's using NodeJS I was expecting a beautiful, responsive, SPA blog engine that is fast. After reviewing it and even trying to use it as a platform for a newspaper I found that (It's just wordpress and it's not using the power of javascript to it's full extent.)

Fast => I could and I did built a faster wordpress site.

SPA => Nope

Customizable => Nope.

For me it's not worth the extra capabilities instead of a static blog.

I found gatsby(1) great for all my use cases and with some extra work[2] is more dynamic that ghost.

1. gatsby - https://github.com/gatsbyjs/gatsby

2. netlify + contentful - https://www.netlifycms.org/ + https://www.contentful.com/

(I would love to see a CMS that embraces SPA/PWA. On the other side I would hate to serve 1mb of JS just to show 4 paragraphs and 1 picture)

Trying to decide between these:

(a) Wordpress
(b) SquareSpace
(c) https://strapi.io/
(d) https://prismic.io/
(e) https://www.contentful.com/

The output will be a simple website, we already have all pages in HTML, and from the tech perspective we could use any of the above.

What I've seen was: SquareSpace is still rather limited, Prismic and Contentful are around $500 per month in their non-free-tier, and Strapi is just too expensive to find devs for. Plus their editor looks the same as Wordpress's if I'm honest.

On the other hand, Wordpress has a massive community of reasonably priced freelancers, has updates many times a year, and most things you want out of the box (such as SEO, or easy hosting on Heroku or elsewhere). The only thing it doesn't have is the excitement to work with it :)

Is there a good business case for any of the competitors?

Medium has a great low barrier to entry but if you're a developer looking to post your own content or are setting up a site for someone I seriously recommend looking into a static site set up.

With services like GitHub and Netlify (for hosting) and Contentful (as a content editing GUI) the day-to-day experience is seamless, you don't have to worry about security issues like you have with a traditional CMS, and you can make use of amazing tools like Gatsby.js (React based static site generator).

My colleague Khaled made a great tutorial specifically about Gatsby.js: https://www.contentful.com/blog/2018/02/28/contentful-gatsby-video-tutorials/

Full disclosure: I work for Contentful

You seem to confuse things. JAMstack doesn't try to replace SPAs, it's trying to replace Wordpress. It's simply a better choice for websites and blogs than either SPA or Wordpress. It really is a different concept than SPA.

In pure JAMstack, APIs are used only at the build step, and you don't have to expose them. You get your content such as blog posts from the API, render them to html and store on CDN.

Monolithic architecture refers mostly to Wordpress. With JAMstack you separate your CMS from your frontend, and you can manage your content with a service like https://www.contentful.com/ that doesn't define how the content gets rendered.

Netlify is exactly that with Gatsby, I have two blogs running on them.

Many themes have now deploy to Netlify buttons:

https://github.com/netlify-templates/gatsby-starter-netlify-cms

Many themes support https://www.contentful.com/ as a backend.

The only thing that's a little concerning to me is the separation of domains: Hosting on a freemium service which deploys me a Node/React based static site generator that can connect to a third party headless CMS. That's why I still use markdown as the source of the content.

Too many moving parts, but at the same time if one goes down for good, I can fix it quite easily.