RFP: Admin Headless CMS

[gil--]

Decide on admin headless cms. All 3 have Gatsby source plugins. Netlify is only 100% free but missing key ecommerce features such as scheduling, composable/modular layouts:

Netlify-CMS (Git) vs Craft CMS (Cloud/Self) vs Prismic (Cloud)

[waywardm]

Why do you need a headless cms, when the data is held in Shopify?

[gil--]

@waywardm Good Question Paul. There are a couple reasons:

• OOB Shopify Theme Customizer is not available to use for Storefront API. Having theme options such as typography, colors, enabling certain features like show related products? use flyout minicart? require accounts?, etc all become much easier if we're using a config file with a merchant-friendly interface such as netlify-cms or one of the other headless CMS

• Pages is not available to use for Storefront API. Thus we need to reimplement so that a merchant can easily add new pages with proper routing, etc. and not have to touch the code.

• Advanced content layout such as homepage, product pages, category landing pages can be done using a headless CMS such as Contentful or Prismic. You'd specify the category, product, or page and then build your page layout using a number of special widgets/modules. Like a page builder.

These are the major reasons I'm considering various headless CMS and Netlify-CMS is definitely at the top due to it being free and not requiring a complex server installation. The major downsides are lack of scheduling, lack of internationalization, and no widget/module to make page-building experiences.

[waywardm]

Thanks for your response,

Having gone through various headless cms, trying to find the perfect one to use with Gatsby is difficult. Whilst I like Netlify Cms for ease of setup, it is very limited in a lot of functionality. The price of contenful is an issue long term when your data level increases you start needing more data. Prismic I find is the better of the three, however I have recently moved over to Airtable to assess that as it has a lot more configurable views, sorting filtering etc for you data before it reaches gatsby and users a familiar spreadsheet style.

I see your point about the pages etc.

I am running a Shopify Site at www.thunderfix.co.uk and would love to have it eventually running on Gatsby.

For me the main issues as it stands are how the cart data is displayed when adding to the cart, the transition between the static site to the shopify cart needs to be as seamless as possible.

The ability to pull in the tree like menu from shopify is a must to ease navigation along with grouped filtering using tags i.e Size_12mm, Size_14mm.

Another main issue is site search.

[gil--]

I've decided on Netlify CMS and will create a PR soon adding some basic functionality and will add additional functionality over time.

Main reasons

• Free & OSS: I'm not requiring someone to immediately pay for a tool to use this repo.
• Platform agnostic: The settings and data is written to friendly non-vendor-lock-in file formats.
• Simple & Easy: Super simple and easy to get started with and understand.
• Modular Widgets: With the recent submission of https://github.com/netlify/netlify-cms/pull/1857 I think it's finally at a state where I'm comfortable including it. Widgets/Types will allow me to add Shopify Sections-like behavior.

Drawbacks

• Scheduling/Auto-Posting not possible. Currently, it's not possible to schedule posts to automatically go live. Not exactly a core use-case so I'm ok with sacrificing this. See https://github.com/netlify/www-post-scheduler
• i18n support is lackluster. Compared to other headless CMS, the i18n support is lackluster.
• Netlify-CMS-Source Image: image handling is subpar imo.

I'll look into creating a few Shopify-specific Netlify CMS components to pull in products, collections, & blog posts.