For the past few months, I've been thinking about my Fantasy/Dream/Perfect CMS. I'm almost to the point that I want to start tinkering with it and see if I can make anything of my ideas. Most of my ideas are not ground breaking, but quality of life improvements for myself. A few examples:
- Automatically fix title casing of titles.
- Suggest alt text for images.
- Suggest a summary for post.
- Micropub support so I can publish from iA Writer.
- Upload images to CDN.
There are a couple ways I could approach it, and I'm not totally sure what to do.
For reference, my current setup is Eleventy and Pages CMS. Pages CMS ad two major advantages for me—consistent front matter and image management. Image management is my biggest pain point when blogging. I'm constantly changing how I manage and serve them. Now, I'm not even using Pages CMS, but a Netlify redirect to take advantage of Netlify Image CDN.
This is all to say, I've got a menagerie of tools making my blog work.
Back to my Dream CMS. Four options:
- A Pages CMS-like client.
- A headless CMS.
- Everything.
- Nothing.
A Pages CMS-like Client
Basically, I could create my own Pages CMS with the quality-of-life features I want sprinkled in, including better image management. Keep using my git repo on GitHub as the source of truth. Could even be a macOS client. Create, update, and delete files to update the blog.
A Headless CMS
Keep using Eleventy, but instead of saving all my content as markdown or JSON files in my repo, have a server with a database that stores it all. Eleventy and Netlify would manage building, caching, and CDN for me.
Everything
What I mean by this is cut Eleventy and Netlify out. Host the site myself and SSR with The Perfect Stack or something. This would put me in total control, but would obviously the most work.
Nothing
Things are mostly working. Pages CMS gives me consistency of frontmatter, which I really appreciate. But development as slowed, and there are still rough edges. Overall, it's great though. I'm getting closer to an image management solution I don't completely hate with a few Shortcuts I've made. Just need to make some changes so images appear in Pages CMS.
Four options, and I can't decide. Analysis paralysis. Something inside of me wants to do the Everything option, knowing it is probably nothing but pain. A headless CMS would probably be the most flexible. A client would be tied directly to GitHub—but could maybe be adapted to work on a local folder instead? Doing nothing sounds easy. But I kinda want a project to waste time on.
What would you do? What have I not considered?