Ask HN: CMS for NGO?
My team is considering a bid for developing a site for a large US based NGO. We've worked on large CMS build-outs before using Drupal but aren't really excited about using it again. We recently built a large site using the WordPress REST API consumed by a Nodejs front-end and were pleasantly surprised with process and results. It provided the client with a consistent interface for editing content and us with decent, modern, testable front-end tooling. Curious to hear fellow HN readers experiences with this domain & similar tooling.
Also worth mentioning, I poked around the 18f.gsa.gov site to see if there were any similar projects but didn't see anything. I saw a reference to Federalist but no links. From the description it sounds Jekyll-esqe so might not be flexible enough for our needs.
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For background, Federalist is tooling wrapped around Jekyll, AWS and Github so that it feels like a CMS but you are actually editing a static site. In building many Jekyll sites for our partner agencies (and for ourself as the 18F site is a Jekyll site) we found that the process of using and maintaining a Jekyll site was very technical and required a great deal of context. So we built Federalist to reduce the friction of using static sites.
It automates the following: * Setting up webhooks on the Github repository to be notified of any changes * Building the site when it receives notifications of a change and then pushing the site to an S3 bucket
On top of that it provides an editing interface for non-technical folks to keep content up to date.
As always, its about tradeoffs and if the WordPress API route is working well for you, I think that's a good one and I've personally heard a lot of great things about the new API and consuming it with a smaller JS app/front end. Personally, I prefer to work with static sites so that I don't have to concern myself with database availability or stability as a single point of failure for the site.
If you're looking for more information, I invite you to join our public slack at https://chat.18f.gov and entering the "federalist-public" room. Hopefully see you there!